The boss of Amazon Game Studios is out. VP Christoph Hartmann is leaving the company according to Bloomberg‘s Jason Schreier. It’s another big blow to another tech giant that once had big ambitions for gaming.
Hartmann was a cofounder of 2K Games and served as the BioShock and Borderlands publisher’s president up until he left in 2017. He joined Amazon a year later to lead a range of studios working on games like the MMO New World, which is now set to go offline in January 2027.
“Gaming, today’s favorite form of entertainment in the world, is connecting hundreds of millions of people,” Hartmann said when joining Amazon back in 2018. “Between the teams at AGS, the incredible tools and technology from AWS, the global communities of Twitch and Twitch Prime, and all of the other assets around Amazon, there are few companies in the world set up to take gaming to the next level.”
Unfortunately, Amazon never managed to bring those tools together, or the other resources at its disposal, to deliver a lasting hit in the ultra-competitive gaming space. One of its projects was a 2020 hero shooter by Relentless Studios called Crucible. If you don’t remember it, that’s because a few months after its release it was “unreleased,” and eventually canceled.
Amazon signaled it was shifting away from AAA game development last fall amid massive cuts across the company. It still hasn’t confirmed the status of a previously announced Lord of the Rings MMO, though one of its developers said the team working on it was also laid off, and remains slated to publish the upcoming Tomb Raider games, including this year’s reboot of the original.
But to the extent that Amazon is still meaningfully invested in gaming, it seems to be mostly focused on its cloud gaming platform Luna. It shifted gears last fall to focus on party games like a courtroom comedy featuring an AI Snoop Dogg. Hartmann and Amazon did not immediately respond to requests for comment.