Amazon prototyping Lord of the Rings video game ideas, says exec

Will Amazon deliver a much-promised Lord of the Rings video game in the future? Amazon Games GM Jeff Gattis says the company remains on the hunt for the perfect concept to deliver to fans.

In a constant state of evolution, Amazon’s gaming business has been one of the most turbulent, yet persistent operations in the industry. Twitch, a slate of MMOs, cloud gaming — the company has experimented in every direction. In a recent conversation with Polygon, Gattis admitted there was still plenty of work to be done to focus the studio and bring cohesion and clarity to its multipronged approach to gaming, which includes Amazon Game Studios proper to the Luna platform and even the Kids Plus model that funnels mobile games to Fire devices. But the GM’s hope is that a few great games could be the gateway to finally creating an identity for Amazon as a gaming company.

“I would argue there’s not been a lot of innovation in the game space in the last decade or so,” he tells Polygon. “I mean, ironically, PUBG might have been it. But I think there are opportunities to create new types of games and that’s a lot of what we’ve been trying to focus on is new game mechanics.”

This is where Lord of the Rings fits in, but also doesn’t. Gattis says Amazon’s slice of Tolkien’s Middle-earth rights is “still part of our portfolio investigation” without anything specific in the works. That doesn’t mean work isn’t happening.

Gattis’ comments come in the wake of news that Amazon’s ambitions for a Lord of the Rings MMO quietly unraveled in the wake of the company’s 2025 layoffs. First announced in 2023 through a deal with Embracer-owned Middle-earth Enterprises, a Eurogamer report from May suggested the project spent years in an unusually early state of development before reportedly reaching pre-production shortly before Amazon’s October restructuring.

While Amazon has never formally announced the game’s cancellation, sources told Eurogamer that developers were being shifted off New World and onto the Lord of the Rings team as the project finally ramped up, only for the broader layoffs and Amazon’s retreat from large-scale MMO development to intervene. That leaves Amazon’s Middle-earth plans largely confined to Prime Video, where a third season of The Rings of Power is set for later in 2026, and a fourth season is already in development.

Image: Amazon Games

While Amazon has a steady pipeline set for publishing, including the next Tomb Raider games, there’s still an internal team toiling away at both MMOs like New World, which Amazon will sunset in January 2027, and unannounced projects. (It also sounds like the team will at least consider developing its own James Bond game in the wake of 007 First Light.) When I push Gattis to understand if creatives are actively experimenting with LOTR concepts at Amazon right now, he gives me a simple “that’s right” while holding the company line. It’s definitely early too announce anything realistically.

“I looked at a prototype as something pretty interesting just a couple of weeks ago,” he says. “We’re just evaluating different concepts, but unfortunately, I don’t have a hard, ‘This is what we’re going to do’ I can give you today.”

Whenever Amazon gets to its own Lord of the Rings game, it’ll have some healthy competition: In May, Warhorse Studios, the team behind the acclaimed Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, announced it was at work on an open-world game set in Middle-earth.