After getting decimated during last week’s companywide layoff, former employees of Amazon Game Studios believe the company’s recent cuts mark the beginning of the end for Amazon’s gaming division.
Amazon Game Studios was hit particularly hard by the October 28 layoff of roughly 14,000 workers across Amazon’s corporate divisions. To learn more about the layoff and the events leading up to it, GamesBeat spoke to six former Amazon Games staffers who were laid off last week, all of whom requested anonymity to avoid damaging professional relationships or breaking the terms of non-disclosure agreements.
A skeleton crew
Although Amazon has not released official figures regarding the specific number of jobs cut from its gaming division, four of the recently laid-off staff members estimated to GamesBeat that roughly 300 Amazon Game Studios staff had been included in the layoff. In many cases, entire teams were let go, making laid-off staffers wonder about who — if anyone — would take over their responsibilities moving forward. An Amazon representative acknowledged a request for comment, but did not provide responses to specific questions before the publication of this article.
“My coworkers are all laid-off — not even one person survived from my team,” said one laid-off Amazon Games employee in an interview with GamesBeat. “Everyone is gone, so there is no one to give condolences to me.”
Within Amazon Games, the teams that still have active staff have largely been stripped down to skeleton crews, leaving only one or two employees to handle functions for parts of the department that largely survived the cut, such as Amazon’s game development studio in Montreal. Other teams that survived the cut were those dedicated to ongoing third-party publishing deals, such as Crystal Dynamics’ in-production “Tomb Raider” title and an open-world driving game developed by Maverick Games, according to a second laid-off staffer.
“In terms of marketing or publishing support services, they really stripped away all the non-essential stuff,” the second anonymous staffer said in an interview with GamesBeat.
Following last week’s layoff, Amazon circulated a widely reported memo by vice president of audio, Twitch and games Steve Boom acknowledging that Amazon planned to “halt a significant amount” of its development of first-party, triple-A titles in favor of party games and TV-served titles available on Luna, Amazon’s cloud gaming platform. Three recently-laid-off Amazon staffers told GamesBeat that they believed this memo misleadingly framed last week’s layoff as a pivot, rather than the first step toward a shutdown of Amazon Game Studios, pointing out that Amazon Luna lives within a completely different division of the company. Amazon announced a re-design for Luna on October 23, and published its latest content update for the platform yesterday, November 6.
“These are sister companies, in the sense that they both do gaming stuff, but they’re not integrated in any way,” the second anonymous staffer said. “So, if AGS dies, then Luna continues on.”
Amazon Game Studios is certainly not immediately suspending the development of all triple-A titles in its portfolio. Although “New World” is officially over following the end of its current season — and Amazon has also halted development of its upcoming “Lord of the Rings” title, according to an October 30 report by Rock Paper Shotgun — Amazon has announced definitive plans to continue development on “Lost Ark” in 2026, with the company slated to reveal the MMO’s future roadmap next month.
How the layoff went down
The six laid-off Amazon Games staffers who spoke to GamesBeat for this article described last week’s layoff as a mixture of ruthless efficiency and cold corporate policy. Laid-off employees received an early-morning email describing their exact next steps, as well as severance terms and an explanation of the internal tools and services they could still access. Like laid-off employees in other divisions of the company, former Amazon Games staffers will be kept on payroll for 90 days, then granted one week of severance for every six months they were employed at Amazon.
“I stepped back and I was like, ‘Dude, that was actually pretty impressive how well they executed that termination,’” a third anonymous former staffer told GamesBeat in an interview. “I mean, I was wrapped up and out in 24 hours. It was very cold, it was very corporate — but it was also very logistically impressive.”
Many former Amazon Games employees could feel the end coming, with three former staffers telling GamesBeat that rumors of an impending layoff had swirled around the company as early as September.
“I was mentally prepared for this; I kind of saw it coming, and I heard from multiple very reliable sources internally that this was happening, and that more than half the company would be let go,” said a fourth anonymous former Amazon Games staffer. “So, for some of us, we knew — we saw it coming — but I know a ton of my colleagues had no idea, and they just woke up to that.”
During the week before the layoff, Amazon Games rebranded to Amazon Game Studios, making some employees feel more confident about the department’s long-term vision.
“The fact that these two things sort of converged at the same time — you had all these people excited, because a rebrand implies a reinvigoration, right?” the second anonymous former staffer said. “We’re doubling down, we’re committing to this — and its like, ‘syke!’ one week later.”
A long time coming
Even before the rumors started circulating earlier this year, all six of the laid-off Amazon staffers who spoke to GamesBeat for this article said that the writing had long been on the wall that Amazon’s gaming dreams were not playing out as planned.
During the creation of Amazon’s online gaming business, former CEO Jeff Bezos told one game industry leader that he wanted “computationally ridiculous” games, meaning those like MMOs that would require a lot of Amazon’s data center infrastructure to run. This was a sign of a strategy that Amazon would create a competitive moat by running games smaller companies could not.
All of Amazon’s biggest game releases — ”New World,” “Lost Ark” and “Throne and Liberty” — are massively-multiplayer online titles, and Amazon Games staffers felt they were cannibalizing their own audiences by focusing on this genre.
“Just looking at your own player pool, you’re just pulling players from one of your games to another game,” the fourth anonymous staffer said. “Sometimes, that’s good, because there’s a little bit of player trust involved. But if you’re trying to grow your concurrent users, or you’re trying to grow your revenue, that’s tough.”
In addition to MMOs, three laid-off Amazon Games employees told GamesBeat that they felt the company had been held back by its focus on developing new multiplayer online battle arena games, such as “March of Giants.” Employees’ internal reservations line up with industry analysts’ observation that Amazon Game Studios was prioritizing the development of older, more saturated genres, rather than exploring new or growing game formats.
“Some would argue that Amazon Games’ focus on MMOs as a genre was outdated from day one,” said George Jijiashvili, a senior principal analyst covering games for Omdia. “It was more suited to strategy in 2005 — not in 2025.”
In spite of their skepticism, former Amazon Game Studios employees told GamesBeat that they felt locked into the company’s MMO projects, with three of them pointing out that the decision to prioritize MMOs had been made before they joined the company. Amazon is known for having a relatively high turnover rate for employees, with high standards for performance — but this strength is arguably a weakness when developing a game genre whose titles are notorious for taking many years to build up momentum.
“We should be right to question the strategy that Amazon Games chose to begin with, in terms of genres to go after — because even in the best-case scenario, where Amazon Games really nailed an MMO, we’re talking about Amazon here,” Jijiashvili said. “They’re not trying to go after a few million concurrent users, even though that would be amazing for a normal games company. As a company, they’re trying to go after the mass market.”
With the layoff, Amazon appears to be shifting its gaming strategy toward doing what it does best — providing infrastructural support. Similar to the way Google’s cloud gaming products lived on after the shutdown of Google Stadia in 2023, Amazon’s gametech division is still going strong post-layoff, with Amazon Web Services providing backend tools and infrastructure for titles like Fortnite, Roblox and “League of Legends.” Less than one percent of last week’s laid-off Amazon employees came from AWS, with some parts of the department reportedly left untouched.
Moving forward, Amazon is still going to be a place for games — just not necessarily triple-A games developed in-house.
“Tech giants are underpinning most of the gaming that we’re talking about. We’re talking about AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud services — the Google Play Store, the Apple App Store, and so on,” Jijiashvili said. “But when it comes to these tech giants actually taking a swing at consumer-facing gaming initiatives, the history speaks for itself.”