Amazon has announced that the company’s video game division has canceled its massively multiplayer online role-player based on ‘The Lord of the Rings.
As per Variety, while Amazon is shelling out a whopping USD 465 million for season one of its ‘Lord of the Rings’ TV adaptation, the company’s games unit has canceled plans to send players to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth.
In 2019, Amazon Game Studios had announced plans for a massively multiplayer online game set in “a time long before the events of ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ exploring lands, people, and creatures never seen before by fans of the Tolkien universe.”
The tech giant had inked a deal to develop the free-to-play console/PC game title with Leyou Technologies, a Hong Kong-based games company. After Chinese media and entertainment company Tencent Holdings acquired Leyou in December 2020 in a deal worth USD 1.5 billion, Amazon and Tencent failed to reach a deal on revised contract terms for the ‘Lord of the Rings’ game, resulting in Amazon Game Studios bailing on the project.
“We love the ‘Lord of the Rings’ [intellectual property] and are disappointed that we won’t be bringing this game to customers,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement.
The team that was working on the “LOTR” prequel game will be moved to different projects, according to Amazon.
News of the cancellation comes after Amazon Game Studios last year scrapped plans for ‘Crucible’, a third-person, last-one-standing game “of trust and betrayal.” The unit’s much-delayed ‘New World’, a sandbox MMO game in which players engage in a struggle to conquer and colonize a “new world” wilderness, has been rescheduled for the summer 2021 release.
The ‘LOTR’-based game project was separate from Amazon Studios’ massive adaptation of ‘The Lord of the Rings, which encompasses a multi-season production commitment produced in cooperation with the Tolkien Estate and Trust, HarperCollins, and Warner Bros.’ New Line Cinema.