Amazon has just confirmed that its Lord of the Rings MMO has been officially canceled. Amazon’s Lord of the Rings MMO was rumored to have been canceled following the major Amazon layoffs in October 2025, but the company hadn’t officially confirmed anything until now.
Amazon first announced it was making a Lord of the Rings MMO back in May 2023 and the game entered its pre-production phase in late 2025. Amazon’s now-canceled Lord of the Rings MMO would have been the second Middle-earth MMO on the market, with Daybreak’s The Lord of the Rings Online still enjoying a sizable player-base 19 years after its initial launch.
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Amazon’s Lord of the Rings MMO Is Officially Canceled
Back in October 2025, Amazon laid off around 14,000 employees. This monumental wave of layoffs affected a large portion of the Amazon Game Studios branch, and it was strongly suspected that the company’s Lord of the Rings MMO had been canceled in the aftermath. In the days following the layoffs, a former Amazon Game Studios senior gameplay engineer wrote in a LinkedIn post that fans “would have loved” the Lord of the Rings MMO, and a leaked internal memo from Amazon’s Vice President of Games Steve Bloom suggested that the company was scaling back its AAA and MMO production.
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For the last seven months, the Lord of the Rings MMO’s cancelation has remained a rumor. But that changed today. As part of a wider investigation into the cancelation of Amazon’s generative-AI-led game Project Trident, Eurogamer reached out for clarification regarding the status of the Lord of the Rings MMO. Amazon’s Head of Games, Jeff Grattis, supplied them with this statement:
“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.”
This statement seemingly confirms that the Lord of the Rings MMO that was first announced in May 2023 has been canceled. But this statement also suggests that Amazon isn’t giving up on the Middle-earth franchise altogether. Instead, a “compelling new game experience” is currently being explored at Amazon Game Studios. While there’s no official word on what this new Lord of the Rings game experience could be, Insider Gaming reported back in March that Crystal Dynamics could be working on a Middle-earth game. Crystal Dynamics is also currently working closely with Amazon on Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis and Tomb Raider: Catalyst.
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The (Brief) Development History of Amazon’s Lord of the Rings MMO
As well as confirming once and for all that Amazon’s Lord of the Rings MMO is officially dead, Eurogamer’s report sheds a little light on the game’s brief development journey. According to Eurogamer’s anonymous sources who were close to the project, Amazon had announced the Lord of the Rings MMO before it had found a dedicated development team, and that for years only “one or two” people worked on the game as a side project. Just before the October 2025 layoffs, over 1,000 developers were allegedly moved from working on New World: Aeternum over to The Lord of the Rings game. It’s now believed that after the layoffs, the only MMO developers left at Amazon are those trying to wind down already-released MMOs like New World, Throne and Liberty, and Lost Ark.
