Amazon reportedly cancels its Lord of the Rings MMO following major layoffs

It has been claimed that Amazon Games has cancelled its highly anticipated Lord of the Rings MMO project as part of a major restructuring effort across the company this week.

The details:

• Earlier this week, Amazon announced a wave of layoffs that would affect over 14,000 jobs across the entire company, with its game studio being hit hard by the cuts. This included Amazon Games Orange County, the developer responsible for New World, which announced that development would come to an end on the MMORPG, with the game now in maintenance mode.
• As spotted by Rock Paper Shotgun, a LinkedIn post from an Amazon Games engineer who was laid off appears to have confirmed that the company’s Lord of the Rings MMO has been scrapped alongside the job cuts.  "This morning I was part of the layoffs at Amazon Games, alongside my incredibly talented peers on New World and our fledgling Lord of the Rings game (y'all would have loved it)," they wrote.
• The Lord of the Rings MMO was officially announced in 2023 as part of a partnership with Embracer Group’s Middle Earth Enterprises and had been described as a "persistent open-world MMO adventure" that would span the events of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.