[STEAM] It Looks Like Amazon's The Lord of the Rings MMO Is Dead

[Steam 0]

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’s The Lord of the Rings MMO appears to have been canceled as part of sweeping layoffs that hit the company’s gaming business hard.

This week,

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. According to a report by

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, these layoffs included “significant” cuts to

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’s video game operation, which will reduce development work and layoff staff mainly in its Irvine and San Diego offices. Bloomberg said

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was cutting back especially on MMOs.

That sparked concern for The Lord of the Rings MMO. Now, one former

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Games developer hit by the cuts has indicated the game has indeed fallen by the wayside.

“This morning I was part of the layoffs at

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Games, alongside my incredibly talented peers on New World and our fledgling Lord of the Rings game (y'all would have loved it),” the developer said in a now-deleted post on LinkedIn.

“It’s always tough to see such a strong team go through something like this — I’ve been lucky to work with some of the most skilled, creative, and kind developers I’ve ever met here.”

The line “y'all would have loved it,” does suggest The Lord of the Rings is now dead. Neither

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nor Lord of the rings rights holder Embracer have responded to IGN’s request for comment.

Although The Lord of the Rings was

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, in August last year,

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it was still early days. "We're still trying to find the hook, find that idea of what it is because we don't just want to go and do the same thing over," Hartmann said at the time.

"While it's tempting sometimes with an existing IP, that's not the point of doing it. You've got to find a fresh twist, and we're still, I think, in that ******* where we really want to find out what could be the hook, what could be the thing which is different to all the other games out there. So it's a little bit early.”

In 2023,

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it needed to be "exploiting Lord of the Rings in a very significant fashion" by turning it into “one of the biggest gaming franchises in the world.”

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in August 2022 and announced plans to explore opportunities to create new games, movies, and more based on the famous intellectual property soon after.

This isn’t the first time

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has canceled a Lord of the Rings MMO. In 2021,

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that was first announced in 2019 amid a contract dispute with Tencent.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on

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at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at *****@*****.tld.

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