Amazon makes ‘significant’ cuts to video-game teams in Irvine, San Diego

By Jason Schreier | Bloomberg

Amazon.com is gutting its video-game division as part of a sweeping layoff that will eliminate more than 14,000 corporate jobs.

The company didn’t say how many video-game jobs will be cut, but noted in a memo Tuesday that “significant role reductions” would fall on its offices in Irvine and San Diego, as well as its central publishing division. The company will reduce the amount of work it does on big-budget titles, particularly surrounding massively multiplayer online games or MMOs.

Steve Boom, vice president of Audio, Twitch, and Games, said in the memo reviewed by Bloomberg that the company is “leaning into the things that Amazon does best.”

In recent months, the company has doubled down on Luna, the cloud gaming service. The company’s Montreal studio will continue development of the strategy game March of Giants. Amazon will also continue to release “casual and AI-focused games” for the cloud service, according to the memo. The San Francisco-based external studio Crystal Dynamics is still working on a new Tomb, Raider game and UK-based Maverick Games continues to work on a racing title.

Amazon has been trying to crack the video-game industry for more than a decade but has struggled to make a dent despite a few hits such as Lost Ark, a Korean game the company published in western markets.

With the cutbacks, the company is moving away from online games such as New World, which reached more than 900,000 concurrent players on the PC platform Steam following its release in 2021. Amazon had also been working on an MMO based on The Lord of the Rings.

Last week, Amazon released Courtroom Chaos, a Luna party game featuring an AI-driven digital version of the rapper Snoop Dogg. Earlier this month, the company also put out a party game called King of Meat that didn’t receive much attention, peaking at 253 concurrent players on Steam.