There and back again.

Amazon's head of games Jeff Grattis has told Eurogamer that the company is continuing to work on a Lord of the Rings "game experience", after the now all-but confirmed cancellation of its previously announced Lord of the Rings MMO.

His statement comes in response to a request for comment from Eurogamer, made after learning more about the Lord of the Rings MMO's cancellation from sources familiar with the studio. This was part of a larger investigation into a company-wide push to use generative AI, and the cancellation of a gen-AI game Project Trident.

Grattis' statement in full reads as follows:

"Our creative team continues to explore a compelling new game experience that does justice to Tolkien's world; we are working closely with Middle-earth and remain excited about the IP."

Amazon has been silent about this Lord of the Rings MMO ever since last October's layoffs. The game, first announced in May 2023 as a partnership between Amazon and Embracer Group's Middle Earth Enterprises, had been in very early development since its announcement, and moved to pre-production mere months before the 2025 layoffs, according to a source speaking to Eurogamer. This source has been granted anonymity to protect their career.

The MMO had been presumed cancelled for various reasons already. Not only had Amazon kept quiet about the game, its vice president of games, Twitch, and audio Steven Boom reportedly wrote in an internal memo these layoffs came alongside a company decision to halt a "significant amount of our first-party AAA game development work – specifically around MMOs".

Additional evidence pointing to its cancellation include a former developer briefly referencing the project in a farewell post, in which they reveal they'd been laid off alongside their peers on the Lord of the Rings game, and that people "would have loved it". On top of this, all mention of the Lord of the Rings game appears to have been removed from Amazon Game Studios' website, with the Internet Archive showing its presence on the 16th October 2025.

A source speaking to Eurogamer claimed that, in the months prior to Amazon's decision to end New World's active development, a decision announced to that team a few weeks before the October 2025 layoffs, "over 1,000" developers had begun transitioning onto the Lord of the Rings team. Amazon was, they claim, in the process of "ramping everybody off New World" and onto the Lord of the Rings MMO when the company-wide layoffs then happened.

"When they got the license [Amazon] immediately announced it was making it before talking to any developers," the source said. Adding that "for many years" it had only "one or two people working on it as a side project." According to the source, only "a single concept art" was created every few months, describing it as "standard concept art that didn't warrant the time." This source claims the period when developers were being transitioned onto the Lord of the Rings team was "when it was actually going into pre-production."

According to the source, the only MMO developers left employed at Amazon Game Studios are those keeping games like Lost Ark, Throne and Liberty, and New World up and running until they are fully sunset. For New World, we know that date to be the 31st January, 2027.

This all could tie in to recent rumour circulating around new Lord of the Rings games. Reportedly Warhorse Studios - creator of Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 - is developing an open world game in the Lord of the Rings universe. Warhorse, a company owned by Plaion which itself is owned by Embracer Group, would have access to the IP through the aforementioned Middle Earth Enterprises.

Reports also claim Crystal Dynamics is working on its own Lord of the Rings game, the same studio working with Amazon in a pair of upcoming Tomb Raider games. Whether this is the new game experience Amazon is working on, or it's something else entirely, remains a mystery. Notably, Grattis' above statement doesn't definitively rule out Amazon eventually resurrecting MMO plans some day down the line.

If you want to read more about the goings on at Amazon Game Studios during the cancellation of the Lord of the Rings MMO, you can read Eurogamer's report on Amazon's company-wide push to use A, and the story of its curious, LLM-powered game, Project Trident.

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Extracted and lightly reformatted for readability. · Source: pt