Amazon Game Studios' Troubled History
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A new article from Bloomberg's Jason Schreier and Priya Anand has shed light on the troubles with Amazon Game Studios. The article looks into the history of the studio, including a damning profile of Mike Frazzini, Vice President of Games. Bloomberg's info was sourced from interviews with more than 30 current and former Amazon employees.
Amazon is spending nearly $500 million a year operating the video game division, not including Twitch. Both of the studio's released games (The Grand Tour and Crucible) have been significant flops and delisted. Their next game, the MMO New World, was delayed to 2021 and was criticised for racially insensitive content.
Highlights:
▸ Frazzini kicked off Amazon's games initiative in 2012 and soon became boss.
▸ Led the acquisition of Twitch in 2014 for $970m USD and hired big names in the industry, many who have already left, including Louis Castle (ex-Westwood Studios) and Kim Swift (creator of Portal).
▸ Some projects were called ""Bezos Games"", which had a target to get 10k people to play in a single game session.
▸ Frazzini was reportedly ignorant of the game development process, and directed the studio to follow game trends, with many cancelled projects inspired by popular games like League of Legends and Fortnite.
▸ There were internal conflicts between the Amazon Game Studios and Twitch teams on various projects, including adding a digital games store to Twitch to bypass commission to Steam.
▸ Instead of using popular existing engines, they licensed Crytek's technology to create proprietary Lumberyard engine, which caused major barriers for development. A common saying was “Lumberyard is killing this company.”
▸ There were also reports of a toxic and sexist ""bro-culture"".
▸ Frazzini is not involved with Amazon's new Luna game streaming service.
Source: Bloomberg - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-01-29/amazon-game-studios-struggles-to-find-a-hit
#amazongamestudio #bezos #jasonschreier