Zeeed
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Here is the original article that is behind a paywall if you have used up your free look:
But here is a summary from Kotaku:
They highlighted these points from the Bloomberg article:
Amazon Can Make Just About Anything—Except a Good Video Game
The company produces successful movies, TV shows, e-readers and speakers, but gaming has proven difficult to crack.
www.bloomberg.com
But here is a summary from Kotaku:
Bloomberg Report Details Major Dysfunction At Amazon Game Studios
You may know it as the Everything Store. But there’s one chunk of “everything” Amazon has failed to crack: video games. A new report from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier and Priya Anand sheds light on why Amazon Game Studios, backed by one of the planet’s biggest companies, can’t seem to make a...
kotaku.com
- Initial designs for the game New World—in which you play as a colonist in a fictionalized 17th-century America—featured enemy designs that bore an uncomfortable similarity to Native Americans. Per Bloomberg, Amazon “hired a tribal consultant who found that the portrayal was indeed offensive.” New World, which was initially slated for an August 2020 release, is now planned for a spring 2021 release.
- Developers at Amazon Game Studios were forced to use a proprietary development tool called Lumberyard. (You may have read about this in a piece of similarly excellent reporting by Wired’s Cecilia D’Anastasio from last October.) In 2018, Amazon brought on Christoph Hartmann, a Take-Two veteran, as vice president of game studios. He eased the “mandate” that forced everyone to use Lumberyard.
- “Bro Culture” is reportedly pervasive at Amazon’s game development studios. One woman told Bloomberg that, following a disagreement with a male member of senior leadership, he made up some new positions above her and hired men into those roles.
- Amazon on-boarded storied developers who worked on popular series like Portal and Far Cry. Of them, just one remains.
- The leader of the entire games division, Mike Frazzini, had never made a video game before. He’d reportedly frustrated developers with basic takes and had trouble differentiating between gameplay and concept footage.
- Rather than designing new concepts, Amazon pushed to create takes on other popular games. A project called Nova, inspired by League of Legends, was cancelled in 2017. One called Intensity, sparked by Fortnite’s staggering success, was binned in 2019. And then there’s the ill-fated, Overwatch-like Crucible, which face-planted so hard it was released and then un-released last year.
- Amazon Luna, the company’s foray into the hot games-on-demand space, doesn’t even fall under the gaming division. It’s run by David Limp, who helms Amazon’s devices division (responsible for physical products like the Kindle and the Echo).