The Lord of the Rings MMO in development at Amazon has been cancelled, but there’s still a Tolkien-based something on the way, Eurogamer reports. The fate of the Lord of the Rings MMO has been uncertain since October 2025, when Amazon laid off a significant portion of its Games division, shuttered its four-year-old MMO, New World: Aeternum, and cut way back on major game investments.

Amazon passively confirmed the cancellation of the Lord of the Rings MMO to Eurogamer, which asked for a comment after hearing from studio insiders this year that it was officially shelved. Amazon’s gaming lead Jeff Grattis said, “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.” That’s as close to a “yeah, that big ol’ MMO is dead” as it comes, in marketing speak.

The New World team, Amazon Games Orange County, started publicly working on the Lord of the Rings MMO in 2023. When the layoffs rolled through two years later, Amazon said in a staff memo that it was withdrawing support for big-budget titles and especially MMOs, but the company didn’t publicly name names. Around that time, a former senior gameplay engineer apparently posted and then deleted a LinkedIn message alluding to the death of the Lord of the Rings MMO (while breaking our hearts even more): “This morning I was part of the layoffs at Amazon Games alongside my incredibly talented peers on New World and our fledgling Lord of the Rings game (y’all would have loved it).”

Claims of the cancellation emerged this week as part of a larger Eurogamer investigation into Amazon’s generative-AI mandates and subsequent layoffs.

Amazon still has rights to make video games based on The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit under its 2023 deal with Embracer Group, and it’s also producing the Rings of Power television show based on JRR Tolkien’s works. Amazon recently announced it was shutting down Glowmade’s dungeon crawler King of Meat just six months after launch, and it’s currently focused on simplifying Luna, its game-streaming service, in an overt bid to make Prime subscriptions more attractive. 

Let’s hope the equation of (has LotR license) + (needs Luna content) + (is OK with AI in creative settings) doesn’t lead to something dreadful here.