From a distance, it’s seems like its taken Amazon Games a few years to find its footing. After the division’s first major release, Crucible, didn’t work out, it had two big hits with MMORPGs New World (which Amazon developed in-house) and Lost Ark (from developer Smilegate). Now, the strategy is pretty clear: Amazon Games is doubling down on what has already worked while exploring new directions.
It has at least two MMORPGs in the pipeline: NCSoft’s Throne and Liberty (for which Amazon is the publisher in many major markets) and its own Lord of the Rings game. A console version of New World (dubbed New World: Aeternum) is set to arrive on October 15.
But there are projects in other genres in the pipeline too. Blue Protocol, an action RPG from Bandai Namco, is one of at least three titles (Throne and Liberty is the other) that Amazon Games will release by the end of the year.
The division is publishing a single-player Tomb Raider game from Crystal Dynamics and an open-world driving title from Maverick Games. There are some other projects in the pipeline.
During Gamescom’s Opening Night Live showcase, Amazon Games made an appearance with a brand-new game announcement. King of Meat is a co-op dungeon crawler for up to four people. Players can create their own dungeons and there’s an overarching game show setting, a bit like Fall Guys. This project from indie studio Glowmade looks like a promising party game and it marks new territory for Amazon Games.
To find out more about the division’s strategy and ambitions, I had a chat with Christoph Hartmann ahead of Gamescom. Hartmann, who is a co-founder and former president of 2K Games, has been the vice president of Amazon Games since 2018.
After the successful MMOs, Amazon Games was eager to add something rather different to its portfolio and found that in King of Meat. [Note: The quotes have been edited for clarity.]
“Sometimes, it’s very hard for bigger studios to take a different approach and sometimes also be willing to deal with the unknown because when you do that for a long time, do the same thing over and over, you quickly come up with a list of why it doesn’t work,” Hartmann said. Glowmade, however, was more focused on how its idea could work and how to make the game fun, which stood the team in good stead.
“Honestly, you also go with your gut,” Hartmann added. “I’ve been doing this for almost 30 years and I could analyze it, run through a list and this and that. But we all — not just me, many on our team — had a really good feeling about [them]. We felt they were hungry, they’re creative, they’re funny. They had an idea just to do something different and we felt we should go for it.
“Plus the UK is such a great place for development. So many great games came from there. So, I think having someone coming from an area which is very well known for gaming, it felt like definitely something to take a bet on. So far, from what we have seen, it really, really paid off for us.”
In terms of how King of Meat fits into the overall vision, Hartmann noted that Amazon Games is taking a methodical approach to its pipeline:
“Eventually, we want to have a foot in most genres. We started off with MMO simply because we saw an opportunity. There was not that much coming out. We had New World. We had Throne and Liberty, which is coming out later in the year. We did Lost Ark, which was a great success.
“From MMO, we’re moving on. Another area is to find smaller, younger studios to do more adventurous things which maybe don’t even fall directly into a category. Something which is not as clear, defined and straightforward as an MMO, where everyone pretty much can give you the list of what defines the genre.
“That’s how it fits in, because we diversify more. It’s just the next phase of game titles we are doing. We’re evolving out of the MMOs. It fits very nicely into one of those… I don’t like the word ‘buckets’ but somehow it describes it probably best right now.”
Mission Statement
King of Meat, then, forms part of one of Amazon Games’ ambitions, which is to become one of the top publishers in the West by both revenue and the quality of games it’s releasing.
“That’s the size, the expectation Amazon has,” Hartmann said. “Amazon is a large company. Any smaller probably would be not of interest to them. Amazon is becoming more and more an entertainment company when you see Prime Video, which is fantastic right now. You have Audible, you’ve got music and so on. We’re one piece of that larger entertainment group.”
Although gaming has been around for many decades at this point, it’s still “the most modern piece of entertainment,” Hartmann noted.
To that end, Amazon Games’ mission statement is broadly “size, it’s working together with the other assets and, and for me personally, it’s also doing something interesting. Something we haven’t done. That’s really the motivation for many of us. Amazon is a great place where we can try out new things.”
Hartmann added that while it’s not yet clear where AI is going, it will be a “cornerstone in the long run” and Amazon Games wants to be one of the leading players in that space. Being a part of a larger company that’s placing more of an emphasis on AI will likely help on that front as other divisions are thinking about how to use it and can perhaps offer some ideas.
That said, Hartmann suggested that the mission statement isn’t set in stone and it may evolve. “It’s a changing world. It could be that we either find something or something happens and we adapt to it. I don’t wanna be the stubborn guy who reads the sentence out to you and then sticks with it for 10 years.”
Long Way To The Top
On that note, Hartmann said it will likely take that long (a decade) for Amazon Games to be considered one of the truly top players in the industry. However, the timeline could be accelerated if some projects land squarely in the zeitgeist.
“You always can have one title which is so amazing that it happens within two years. But we have to be realistic. Those lucky shots happen once in a lifetime. When I look at our lineup, right now we have 10 titles in development and we keep on signing things — we’re not in a signing frenzy, but very actively moving forward — in my experience, probably it takes 10 years.
“You probably have to go through two to three cycles of games. I think cycles of games are often defined for me by change in hardware and gaming change. You probably have to run through two to three cycles of games to see what stands out because we all know from the 10 titles we do now, not all 10 titles will be successful. For the ones that will be successful, we double- and, in Amazon’s case, probably triple-down to take them to the next level. That’s around about the timeframe with a very methodical approach.”
Diversifying the types of projects Amazon Games puts out could very well help it reach its goals, but there are varying factors that go into making different types of games. Hartmann said, that given his history of working on the NBA 2K series and with Prime Video broadcasting a variety of major sports, he’d love to work on sports games, but without a license and a team with the right experience, that would be difficult to pull off.
Ultimately, he’s open to a range of genres because “games really come down to people. You’re always taking a bet on the creative team more than you take on the genre. If you have the right people, great people do great things. If I find a team who’s really good and I strongly believe them, I very quickly overcome anything I said before, like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to do that.’”
Outside Expertise
Amazon’s internal development teams have primarily been working on MMOs so far. As such, partnering with third-party studios that have expertise in other types of games is a critical part of accelerating the pipeline, particularly given how long it takes to make games:
“Strategically, we moved into MMO because I felt not a lot has come out. We could see with New World and Lost Ark there was quite a hunger from that community. I think my instinct there was spot on.
“But if you do something internal, it takes you five years to do a game and then you have to find the creative talent. The much more realistic way [is] that at the beginning you work with external partners who have an expertise in something because they went one or two times through the experience of building a type of game or the type of genre.
“If I bring it in-house and start from scratch, it probably could take me one or two games to really be number one because the people we have on MMO they’re all super-experienced people. When you go through the folks who helped to shape those titles, that’s not their first rodeo. If we want to diversify the lineup, we need to work with external partners.
“The other option is going the route of acquiring studios, but truthfully, it’s not always a guarantee. There’s some great acquisitions, but there have been many acquisitions which didn’t work. I think bringing creative teams into a large company isn’t always the best thing for the creative team. I think they’re sometimes better off being creatively left alone.
“That’s not true for every team and every game. But especially the younger teams who have a fresh approach to either the mythology or the genre or what they want to invent, they might be almost better off to do it their way.
“I’m someone who is definitely more on the careful side in terms of acquisition. For me, it’s most important that people have the right environment, the right setup so we maximize being creative and living off their experience. Some of that can be external and one day, it might be internal. But otherwise it will just take us too long if you want to diversify. If we do it all internal right now, it just takes too long.”
The Ideal Cadence
Games take a long time to make and we’ve all heard horror stories about developers who’ve been forced to crunch (i.e. work long hours for weeks on end to meet a deadline). I asked Hartmann what his ideal cadence for game releases would be, and how that squares with making sure teams have as much time as they need to ensure their projects are of the highest quality:
“I think there’s three windows you can ship a game. That’s spring, summer and fall.
“Spring is good for new IPs [intellectual properties], early in the fall is good for new IPs. But you really want to have your blockbuster coming in the fall because that’s when the market is just the biggest. The summer is also a good time for trying new IPs, especially when you have very fanboy-driven genres, where you have a built-in group who doesn’t care about the weather outside. They will play because that type of game is coming out.
“So that almost defines how often you can ship a game. You can do three games a year. I don’t think you can launch more than that.
“Games slip. I think the ideal lineup is to plan for three to four games a year and then have two to three releases. That’s my ideal cadence.
“If you have a larger-than-life game, it could be that you should ship one because the whole organization is built around that. But I think hardly any organization except split-out businesses can actually digest doing more games than three a year.”
Lessons From Crucible
As I mentioned earlier, Amazon took a swing and a miss on Crucible, a game it released in 2020 but pulled back into closed beta after only a few weeks to rework the gameplay. A few months later, the company scuttled Crucible entirely and moved the developers onto other projects.
With the game development process taking so long, we’re around the point where an entire project could have been started and finished since Crucible‘s cancellation. So, I asked Hartmann about the lessons Amazon Games took from that game’s failure and whether they’d started bearing fruit:
“When we shipped Crucible, I was with the company for nine months. So, it’s a little bit of a tough one. I could have made the decision to add another three years to it, but I actually felt we should ship it because you have to get some experience and an organization has to learn how to put out a title and you’re actually better off getting your weaker titles out to learn so you really get ready for the bigger things to come.
“New World was also at that phase then. It was planned to ship within that year. And I said, ‘no, we’re gonna hold it.’ We held it for quite a while because we had to do a lot to the game to bring it forward.
“Once you’re done with two-thirds of the game, you want to ship it, you want to get out, you owe it to the team. It would be very disrespectful to not do it. On the other hand, sometimes you also think it’s important to early on decide what you wanna when you ship and what you don’t wanna ship.
“But since then, I think we have done well. It’s two for two. Lost Ark and New World did well. I hope Throne and Liberty will do the same. I hope the console version… We have high hopes New World will also reinvent MMO on the consoles.
“I know not everything will hit. I’ve done many games and [had] many successes and many things which didn’t work. Truthfully, I often was surprised by what worked really well as what didn’t work. That’s the beauty of entertainment. You never know. Life always stays interesting.”
Surprises
We ended the conversation with a question I often like to ask: “So far, what’s been the most surprising thing for you about leading Amazon Games?”
“The most surprising to me is the steady hand and the support we get from the parent company, which I read [about] in the press but you only believe it when you’re there, because that was what motivated me to come here. They often talk about, ‘we keep on going until we get it right,’ which sounds perfect for games.
“But I came from a world where you had companies which were solely built around games. You should see what goes on in boardrooms or meetings if something doesn’t work and how quickly people change. That steady hand was the most surprising because you only believe it when you see it.
“The other [thing that] was surprising to me is how much I learned. There’s a lot to be learned from a big company that has an approach. I sometimes maybe had to modify it a bit for us gaming people. All of us gaming people learned a lot.
“I think those were the greatest things for me in Amazon Games: the steady hand and the learning we had, and really maximizing the opportunities a company like Amazon can provide.”
