Amazon Game Studios has officially confirmed the cancellation of its Lord of the Rings MMO. The confirmation came not through a press release but buried inside a statement to Eurogamer, which was investigating the separate cancellation of Project Trident, an Amazon generative-AI game. Amazon’s vice president of games Christoph Hartmann stated: “Our creative team continues to explore this universe, seeking compelling gaming experiences that do justice to Tolkien; we are working closely with Middle-earth and remain excited about the IP.”
This was effectively known since October 2025, when Amazon’s wave of layoffs gutted large portions of Amazon Game Studios. A senior gameplay engineer, Ashleigh Amrine, confirmed in a since-deleted LinkedIn post that her entire team had been laid off and the Lord of the Rings game “would never be finished.” Amrine added: “Y’all would have loved it.”
This is not Amazon’s first failure with the property. The company announced a Lord of the Rings MMO in 2019, canceled it two years later, then announced a second one in May 2023 after striking a deal with Embracer Group and Middle-earth Enterprises. That second attempt collapsed before it reached active development.
Tolkien fans should not mourn this.
Amazon’s record with the IP is the record of a company that does not understand what it owns. The Rings of Power launched on Prime Video in 2022 and immediately drew fan backlash for deviating from Tolkien’s established lore, collapsing the Second Age timeline to compress thousands of years of history into a single narrative, and inventing characters and relationships with no basis in the source material. The show treated Tolkien’s world as a setting to be borrowed rather than a mythology to be respected. Nothing in Amazon’s gaming output suggests a different approach would have been applied to an MMO.
The replacement option floating in the rumor mill is not obviously better. Warhorse Studios, the Czech developer behind Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, has been reported as potentially working on a Middle-earth open-world game. Warhorse was already enmeshed in a culture war controversy ahead of KCD2’s February 2025 launch, when preview footage revealed a same-sex romance option for protagonist Henry and a Black African character named Musa, a nobleman from the Kingdom of Mali introduced as part of the invading army. The game’s forums were flooded with backlash. Director Daniel Vávra issued a statement defending the inclusions as historically grounded, noting that the KCD2 setting was a major European trade city rather than an isolated village, and that the player is not required to pursue the same-sex content. The studio’s publisher rolled out a new forum code of conduct banning expressions of homophobia and transphobia, which drew a second wave of anger from players who felt their concerns were being censored.
Whether Warhorse’s rumored Middle-earth project is real has not been confirmed. The studio has not officially announced any Lord of the Rings involvement.
What the cancellation leaves is a franchise with no active gaming footprint of consequence. The LOTR MMO that does exist, Lord of the Rings Online, is decades old and in slow decline. The best-reviewed recent Lord of the Rings games, the Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War series, are a decade behind as well. Amazon had the IP, the budget, and the platform infrastructure to build something that could have served the Middle-earth gaming audience. It announced the project twice and failed twice.
The next confirmed Lord of the Rings gaming move is a Crystal Dynamics third-person action title, reportedly backed by around $100 million from the Abu Dhabi Investment Office and described internally as aiming to compete with Hogwarts Legacy in scale. That project also has not been officially announced.
Tolkien’s world deserves a serious game built by people who read the books. What it keeps getting is corporate IP management dressed up as fandom.
What do you think: is the Lord of the Rings gaming space beyond repair, or does it just need one developer who takes the source material seriously? Let us know.
Six books. One unforgettable world. The Adventures of Baron Von Monocle is steampunk adventure with the kind of worldbuilding and heart that made you fall in love with fantasy in the first place. Start the series on Amazon.
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It's not in decline. It's a very successful MMO. They focus on a committed playerbase. It's very niche and stable, with constant updates.
In the hands of corporations, there is no future for gaming.