September 30, 2016 was a big day for Amazon Game Studios: it was announced at TwitchCon that day Escape, CrucibleAND New Worldsignaling a major move towards big-budget game development. Less than ten years later, we stand amid the rubble of that once grand ambition with one question on our minds: What the hell went wrong?
Because something definitely went wrong. First of all, Amazon stopped the development of Breakaway in 2018, after several shaky announcements and an open alpha release that failed to impress. This happened later NO stopping development of the Crucible, even though it probably should have taken into account that the Crucible ended up being one “unpublished” just a month after its release and finally he was straight canned food.
There were various other threads intertwined throughout – failed games, forgotten game stores, and the like – but to me, the fate of these three games really captures Amazon’s gaming failure: big talk, half-hearted execution, ugly endings, all leading up to yesterday’s announcement serious layoffs at Amazon Games.
Of course, there is no single answer to the question what the hell went wrongbecause of course many things were like that. However, the end of New World and Amazon’s apparent gaming ambitions as a whole bring to mind what former Prime Gaming VP Ethan Evans had to say about it earlier this year – essentially stating that hubris and money are a dangerous combination.
“At Amazon, we assumed that size and visibility would be enough to attract customers, but we underestimated the power of existing user habits,” Evans admitted in his February article Post on LinkedIn. “We never validated our core assumptions before investing heavily in solutions. The truth is that players already had the solution to their problems and weren’t going to switch just because a new one was available.
“We needed to build something much better, but we failed at it. We had to validate our assumptions about our customers before we started building. But we never actually did that. Just because you’re big enough to build something doesn’t mean people will use it.”
Amazon’s failure to crack the Steam key is demonstrated by the fact that not only did it fail to compete, but many people didn’t even know they even tried. This is really not a good sign.
Today I found out that Amazon has a competitive platform to Steam. Lol
— @3mbg.bsky.social (@3mbg.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-10-29T19:21:13.716Z
Amazon: “you took everything from me” Steam:
— @bearpigman.bsky.social (@bearpigman.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-10-29T19:21:13.771Z
Amazon has been OFFICIALLY competing with Steam this whole time?
— @sliwinski.bsky.social (@śliwinski.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-10-29T19:21:13.744Z
I’ve been keen on the game since it came out, and this is literally the first time I’ve heard that they have a game store. I knew about New World or whatever, their MMORPG, but that was it.
— @richs.bsky.social (@richs.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-10-29T19:21:13.688Z
Amazon isn’t completely abandoning games, but it is shifting its focus from big releases like New World to things like An artificial intelligence-based game called Snoop Dogg, in which he is the referee. I’m sure this will work much better.
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