Amazon Games to Lay off Over 100 Employees - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 05 April 2023 / 2,767 Views
Amazon Games vice president Christoph Hartmann in a memo sent to staff obtained by CNBC announced the company would be laying off over 100 employees across the San Diego development studio, Prime Gaming, and the Game Growth Group.
Some employees will be reassigned to other projects that match Amazon Games' strategic focus.
These layoffs are part of 9,000 employees planned to be laid off across Amazon, including over 400 at Twitch. This is on top of the 18,000 laid off earlier this year at Amazon.
"After evaluating our current projects against our long-term goals, the Games leadership team made the difficult decision to eliminate just over 100 roles across Prime Gaming, Game Growth and in our San Diego studio, while also reassigning some employees to other projects that match our strategic focus," reads the memo from Hartmann.
"Each employee whose role has been eliminated should now have a live meeting scheduled this morning so we can discuss these changes directly and give each employee an opportunity to ask questions. There is never a pleasant way to share this sort of news, but we are committed to treating our impacted employees with empathy and respect, and will support them by offering them severance pay, health insurance benefits, outplacement services, and paid time to conduct their job search."
He added, "We will continue to invest in our internal development efforts, and our teams will continue to grow as our projects progress: The New World team in Irvine will grow as we shift some resources to further support its continued development.
"Our studio in Montreal will continue to expand, and is making great progress on their unannounced project. And the San Diego studio will double down on the pre-production phase of their unannounced game, as that project is not yet ready for a full production size team.
"We will also continue expanding our publishing efforts, and we remain very active in exploring and signing new projects where we see great potential, such as our recent publishing agreement with NCSOFT."
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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that's to be expected considering how all their games flopped except for Lost Ark which is made in Korea by another company
Yeah, Amazon and Google both failed at entering the game market. It's not as easy as it looks, apparently!
They barely tried lol. Google shutdown their first-party studios almost immediately after the service launched, never being able to get a single exclusive game out. And they just had a terrible business model. Paying a monthly subscription on top of buying games at full price?!
And Amazon's biggest releases have been on Steam only and nothing to persuade people to try out Luna. Their other studios have put out very few games, and they've all flopped outside of New World and even then, the game had major issues for months that tanked the player base.
So both companies just have yet to understand what makes a video game company successful.
In fairness, Google Stadia shared the GeForce Now business model. GeForce Now requires you to buy it in Steam, and then pay a monthly fee to stream it. It's actually maybe not a bad model, if it saves you spending thousands on a super high-end PC. IF the streaming is good enough, that is!
But yes, Google shut down their efforts before releasing a single game. But, back to my point, that's in part because successfully getting into the game industry isn't as easy as it looks! :)
GeForceNow at least isn't a locked thing like Stadia... it plays games you have on Steam, that is it, it doesn't ask you to buy the game on their service and also pay to keep playing them.
That's true, a GeForce Now subscriber also has the ability to download the game regularly, which a Stadia customer didn't.
Very unfortunate for the employees, but if it makes streaming of games take longer to overtake physical consoles I'm for it.
