Bloomberg report reveals severe dysfunction at Amazon Game Studios

You can know it as the Everything Store. But there is a piece of “everything” that Amazon has failed to break: video games. A new report from BloombergJason Schreier and Priya Anand clarify why Amazon Game Studios, supported by one of the largest companies on the planet, seems unable to make a successful video game.

The details, based on interviews with more than 30 current employees and former Amazon employees, paint an apparent picture that we know very well. An out-of-reach company invests money in an ambitious project. Executives refuse to listen to ordinary employees. The upper echelons institute draconian policies that hamper the flow of work, rather than helping it. You would think that these companies would already have the memo.

Today Amazon’s supposed story, in particular, is like a big case of Bad Video Game Development Yahtzee:

• Initial designs for the game New world“In which you play as a settler in fictional 17th century America” ​​featured enemy designs that had an uncomfortable resemblance to Native Americans. Per Bloomberg, Amazon “hired a tribal consultant who discovered that the portrait was really offensive”. New world, which was initially scheduled for a launch in August 2020, is now planned for a launch in spring 2021.
• The developers at Amazon Game Studios were forced to use a proprietary development tool called Lumberyard. (You may have read about it in an article equally excellent reports in Wired(Cecilia D’Anastasio, last October). In 2018, Amazon hired Christoph Hartmann, a veteran of Take-Two, as vice president of game studios. He facilitated the “mandate” that required everyone to use Lumberyard.
• “Bro Culture” is reportedly broadcast at Amazon’s game development studios. A woman said Bloomberg that, after disagreement with a senior male leadership member, he invented some new positions above her and hired men for those roles.
• Famous Amazon developers who have worked on popular series like Portal and Distant scream. Of them, only one remains.
• The leader of the entire gaming division, Mike Frazzini, had never made a video game before. He reportedly frustrated developers with basic shots and had trouble distinguishing between gameplay and concept footage.
• Instead of creating new concepts, Amazon struggled to create versions of other popular games. A project called New, inspired by League of Legends, was canceled in 2017. A call Intensity, triggered by Fifteen daysimpressive success, was dropped in 2019. And then there’s the ill-fated, Overwatch-to like Crucible, which was planted with such force was released and then not released last year.
• Amazon Luna, the company’s foray into the on-demand games market, doesn’t even fit into the games division. It is managed by David Limp, who runs the device division at Amazon (responsible for physical products like the Kindle and Echo).

If you’re looking forward to another story of stubborn misdirection and wrong decision making in the video game industry, Bloomberglook behind the scenes at Amazon Game Studios it is worth reading in full.