Amazon is doubling down on the Tolkien universe.
After the online retail giant bought the television rights to The Lord of the Rings and launched streaming series The Rings of Power last year, its video game arm, Amazon Games, is now taking a trip to Middle Earth. It has struck a deal with Embracer Group to publish a new massively multiplayer online (MMO) game based on The Lord of the Rings. The game will be set in the mythical land’s Third Age, which is the same time period where the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings books occurred.
Amazon Games Orange County, which made its existing MMO, New World, will lead development on the new title. The company did not announce the title’s name or when it is targeting the game’s release, noting it is still in very early preproduction.
“We have seen behavior at game publishers where they rush games out and it always bites you on the ass,” Christoph Hartmann, vice president of Amazon Game Studios told Fast Company. “I am a big believer in Amazon’s approach to business. They’re not going to force it to ship if it’s not ready.”
While Amazon Games is still a relatively small publisher in the overall gaming market, as cloud gaming grows, it’s poised to become a bigger player. Hartmann is an industry veteran, who founded 2K Games. Besides the existing New World, it’s also publishing an upcoming Tomb Raider game, working with Bandai Namco on a new title and has deals with several other developers.
This isn’t Amazon’s first attempt to get a Lord of the Rings MMO up and running. In 2019, the company announced plans for the online game, in a partnership with Leyou Technologies Holdings Limited, a company that owns several studios, including Warframe developer Digital Extremes. Two years later, however, the game was canceled, after Leyou was bought by China’s Tencent. A clause in the contract with Lord of the Rings license holder, Middle Earth Enterprises, allowed it to terminate a rights deal if one of its partners got acquired.
Last summer, though, Embracer acquired Middle Earth—and Hartmann reached out to an old colleague at that company to raise the idea of working on the game once again. Last week, the deal was struck.
“Everything’s on the table in terms of size and what we want to do,” says Hartmann. “It’s the ‘think big’ phase.”
Well, almost everything is on the table. Because it’s set in the Third Age of Middle Earth, the game won’t have any crossover with Amazon’s The Rings of Power series. (That show is set thousands of years before the events of Lord of the Rings.)
And, as you might expect, the game has no ties with the existing Lord of the Rings Online, another MMO set in the time period of the books. That game, created by Standing Stone Games, has been live for the past 16 years—and developers say they are planning content for years to come.
Hartmann says he’s not worried about players telling the difference between the two games.
“I don’t think there’s going to be much confusion,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong: I’m not trying to be negative. We’re talking about a completely new generation of games in terms of technology and in terms of what’s possible.”
Although a second season is in the works, The Rings of Power has been a bit of a mixed bag for Amazon. The Hollywood Reporter notes that, although the series was Amazon’s biggest debut to date, just 37% of the people who started watching finished the first season. Compare that to an 87% completion rate for Netflix’s Squid Game or 45% for Resident Evil (which was canceled after one season).
Amazon hopes that the name recognition of Lord of the Rings will entice players who might normally shy away from an MMO to give the genre a try. But Hartmann says he recognizes that the game itself has to be good enough to stand on its own, regardless of any fan loyalty to Tolkien’s franchise.
“My approach to the license is, it’s the icing on the cake,” he says. “It should not be the main reason people play [the game]. . . . It needs to be so good that if you strip away The Lord of the Rings, it’s still a good game.”
Recognize your brand’s excellence by applying to this year’s Brands That Matter Awards before the final deadline, June 7.
Sign up for Brands That Matter notifications here.
