So it looks likeAmazon is having another stab at this MMO malarkey, partnering with the dystopian-sounding Embracer Group—who own the entirety of the Middle-Earth IP—to work on a Lord of the Rings MMO. While a Lord of the Rings MMO sounds great in principle, there are a lot of red flags about this particular project made by this particular studio that just makes me question how this can possibly work out well for anyone involved.
For a start, it’sAmazon, guys. While the data-harvesting online megastore is certainly a little more proven in the field of gaming than its data-harvesting peer Google, that’s really not saying much. Amazon Games has already had to cancel its original Lord of the Rings MMO back in 2021, cancelled its free-to-play shooter Crucible mere months after launch, and just last month sacked over 100 employees from its games division.
Amazon Games has existed for 10 years, but its only major ongoing game made in-house is New World—which, after a much-vaunted and heavily hyped launch in 2021, has seen its player numbers plummet since then. While 16,000 concurrent players (via SteamCharts) isn’t terrible by any means, it’s nothing compared to the million or so concurrent users in the game’s first month; New World is on a fairly serious downward population-wise, bumped up only by the occasional event. Its player numbers are yet to reach that crucial stability point, which is absolutely crucial for the long-term lifeline of an MMO.
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So it’s also a little odd that the New World developer (Amazon Games Orange County) has been tasked with making the Lord of the Rings MMO. First up: what effect will a big-name new MMO project have on the ongoing support and evolution of New World? Of course a single developer can expand and create new internal teams, but at a time when Amazon has been downsizing its games division, it seems more likely that potentially lucrative newer projects will be getting the lion’s share of resources over dwindling older ones.
Simply put: Amazon hasn’t shown us anything yet to suggest that it knows how to make a successful online game, and you’d have hoped for New World to be in a better place before they moved onto Lord of the Rings. The most successful thing Amazon can attach its name to is Lost Ark, but its role on that is merely as a global publisher for when the game hit western markets in 2022. Lost Ark was already a roaring success in South Korea for three years preceding that, so piggybacking off of an existing game was a shrewd move but hardly indicative of expertise in this area.
Amazon hasn’t shown us anything yet to suggest that it knows how to make a successful online game
Then there’s Amazon’s handling of the Lord of the Rings mythos itself. The Rings of Power got off to a roaring start, with Amazon touting the viewing numbers for the first two episodes proudly before going strangely silent all the way to the end of the season. Lo and behold, months after the first season ended, figures started cropping up that suggest people dropped off watching the show after the first couple of episodes (yours truly included), with only 37% of those who viewed the first episode going on to finish the season; for perspective, shows with a less than 50% completion rate usually get cancelled on platforms like Netflix.
Like with New World, theideaand the marketing around the TV show was great, leading to an impressive launch, but once the actual material became apparent to players and viewers respectively, things quickly fell apart. For the most lavish, expensive TV show in existence, The Rings of Power was remarkably unremarkable, with some iffy treatment of the source material that doesn’t exactly build confidence that Amazon should be the primary flagbearer for the revered works of J.R.R. Tolkien.
Also, there’s a small but significant elephant in the room, and that’s The Lord of the Rings Online—theoriginalLord of the Rings MMO released back in 2007 that’s still going today. There’s been no mention of it, and I’d be curious to know if Amazon and Embracer have any intentions (or options) to squash the competition there. The game only peaks at around 2000 concurrent players these days, but it’s got a strong, stable community. While that may not seem like much, let’s just wait and see what the player numbers for New World are in another 13 years time, Iif the game still even exists, that is…
As with all their blockbuster projects lately, it all just seems a little bit messy from Amazon. They’ve been struggling to sustain an MMO, they’ve struggled with their Lord of the Rings TV show, so now they’re going to merge these two things and hope it works out, while trying to maintain (or perhaps abandon) their existing MMO in the process. Announcing a Lord of the Rings MMO at this point sounds like the schemings of a company that, despite a good number of years in the games industry now, still hasn’t really grasped how making a game really works.
