Amazon Gaming boss says the Lord of the Rings MMO is not canceled, still exploring

Amazon Gaming GM Jeff Gattis is pushing back on the idea that the Lord of the Rings MMO is fully dead. In an IGN conversation during Summer Game Fest, he insisted “nothing's been canceled per se,” then said Amazon is “currently evalulating various concepts” to determine what kind of Lord of the Rings game it wants to make.

The headline takeaway is simple but important for anyone tracking big-budget game bets: Amazon is still actively exploring a Tolkien-world game even after earlier reports claimed the LOTR MMO was dead. Gattis also confirmed Amazon’s planned Lord of the Rings game would be “completely separate” from the recently announced Middle-earth open world RPG in development at Warhorse, the Kingdom Come: Deliverance developer.

Why this matters is that Amazon’s track record with AAA and MMO bets has been anything but smooth. Last year, Amazon announced that New World would go into maintenance mode, and that decision arrived alongside a round of layoffs affecting an eye-watering 14,000 roles. Bloomberg also reported Amazon was cutting back especially on MMOs, and that the layoffs included “significant” cuts to Amazon’s video game operation across Irvine and San Diego offices. Earlier this year, former Amazon Game Studios boss Christoph Hartman left the company, in what was reported as a continued retreat from the PC and console video-game space in favor of Amazon’s cloud gaming service Luna.

So when Gattis says Amazon is still committed to AAA, it reads less like an investor deck promise and more like a company trying to find a sustainable lane. He told IGN that Amazon Game Studios is “very much committed” to the AAA market, but committed to “the right AAA for the platform.” He framed the assessment as understanding what content makes sense, including an explicit example: Tomb Raider “makes a ton of sense.”

Gattis also described a clear decision filter. In his words, Amazon does not want to necessarily do AAA projects that lack a real reason to exist in Amazon’s ecosystem. He positioned “Broad appeal IP” as a fit with Prime Video, and he connected the broader strategy to what he called “very Amazon things,” starting with the customer and audience. The core idea is operational, not poetic: “Let's zoom out and figure out, where is there an opportunity that's underserved in the market and how can Amazon actually bring some unique value here? And if we can't, let's stay out of it.”

That philosophy hits a brutal reality in the AAA space: Gattis called it “very difficult to break into,” noting that these companies have spent decades and billions of dollars building install bases, IP, network effects, friends, and “all the stores.” Translation for decision-makers: entry is expensive, and the moat is not just game quality, it is distribution, community, and history. For Amazon, that means every new AAA spend has to clear a high bar, because there are few fast paths to the kind of audience gravity that incumbents already have.

Even so, Amazon still sounds committed to making games based on IP it owns. Gattis pointed to Amazon’s broader portfolio, including Tomb Raider, James Bond, and The Lord of the Rings, as well as other external IP, such as the recently released Masters of the Universe: Legends Unite. At the same time, he lowered expectations about Amazon creating brand-new franchises purely to feed its game business. “We have not been, to be candid with you, really focused on creating new IP per se, around characters and the like,” he said. Instead, he described investment in “more innovative game mechanics,” adding that IP could emerge from those mechanics, but Amazon is not treating new character IP creation as the center of gravity. He also acknowledged the frustration of timing, saying Amazon “almost just wish this stuff could come faster so that I could have proof points” rather than asking people to “Trust me.”

Where the rubber meets the road is Amazon’s near-term slate. The first big test of this approach, according to IGN, will be the revival of Tomb Raider, with Legacy of Atlantis, a reimagining of Lara Croft’s original adventure, coming in February 2027. After that, Amazon reportedly plans an entirely new Tomb Raider game, Tomb Raider: Catalyst, plus a Sophie Turner-led Prime Video TV show.

For executives and boards across the gaming industry, the strategic signal is clear: Amazon is not simply walking away from Tolkien or from AAA. It is recalibrating how it enters the space, tightening the link between IP choices, distribution partners like Prime Video, and the company’s ability to bring “unique value.” And if Amazon can keep its Tolkien ambitions alive while separating them from Warhorse’s Middle-earth RPG, it may be testing whether a major IP bet can still justify the risk in 2026, after MMO setbacks and organizational turbulence. The question for peers is whether other platform holders can learn the same lesson: not all AAA bets are created equal, and the “right” bet is the one that fits both the market and the machine you already own.