Amazon Game Studios, a unit of Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) is creating a Lord of the Rings massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) in partnership with Middle-earth Enterprises and Hong Kong-based Leyou Technologies.
The online retail giant is already developing a new Lord of the Rings show that is based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s original books for Amazon Prime Video streaming service. Amazon’s new game is also based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s literary trilogy, but the company said it is not related to the upcoming Lord of the Rings original TV show.
The game will be free to play and Amazon Games Studios will release it on both PC and consoles. Amazon Game Studios plans to market and publish the game globally, though it did not set a release date. Leyou will market and publish the title in China.
“We’re committed to bringing customers games of the highest quality, both with our own original IP as well as beloved cultural pillars like The Lord of the Rings,” commented Christoph Hartmann, VP, Amazon Game Studios.
“Tolkien’s Middle-earth is one of the richest fictional worlds in history, and it gives our team of experienced MMO developers — from the same studio developing New World— tremendous opportunity to play and create. We have a strong leadership team in place to helm this new project, and we’re actively growing our team to help build this incredible experience,” Hartmann added.
Amazon is likely to reveal more details about the game at this year’s Gamescom event that will be hosted in Cologne, Germany, between August 20 and August 24. The crew working on the game apparently consists of veteran developers that have created titles such as Everquest, World of Warcraft, Planetside, and Destiny.
Amazon Games Studio is also developing another original game called New World, which is set in an alternate 17th century.
Amazon.com Inc Profile
Amazon is among the world’s highest-grossing online retailers, with $233 billion in net sales and $408 billion in estimated global gross merchandise volume (GMV) in 2018.
Online product and digital media content sales accounted for 53% of net revenue in 2018, followed by commissions, related fulfillment and shipping fees, and other third-party seller services (18%), Amazon Web Services’ cloud compute, storage, database, and other offerings (11%), Prime membership fees and other subscription-based services (6%), product sales at Whole Foods and other physical store retail formats (7%), and advertising services and cobranded credit cards (4%).
International segments constituted 32% of Amazon’s non-AWS sales in 2018, led by Germany, the United Kingdom, and Japan.
