The open-world driving game from Maverick Games that was announced in 2024 will now move ahead without Amazon. The Game Business confirmed that Amazon is not going to publish the game, while its developers say everything is fine and the game will be revealed this year.
Maverick’s founder and creative director Mike Brown said please do not send him and his team condolences about the news of Amazon dropping out. “We are as good as ever and are getting ready to share the game with you later this year,” he wrote.
Brown was formerly the creative director for the Forza Horizon series. He started Maverick alongside Harinder Sangha, the former Sega Hardlight and Sumo Leamington boss.
Maverick said on social media, “You may have seen the news today, we’re no longer working with Amazon Games Studios. We’re grateful to Amazon Games for their partnership and collaboration. Development of our debut title continues to progress as strongly as planned.”
It added: “We’re in active dialogue with partners who share our long-term ambition for the IP and look forward to sharing more later this year.”
The game is described as a “narrative-led” open-world driving game for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S. Jamie Brittain, the co-creator of the popular British TV show Skins, is the lead writer on the game. The studio is also staffed by developers who worked on the Forza Horizon, Grid, and Dirt franchises.
“Lots of great driving games have amazing gameplay, amazing content,” Brown said in 2024. “But to really cross that bridge, to become a game that people genuinely love, then there needs to be that human connection where you’re actually rooting for these characters, falling in love with these characters. That, I think, is a place where our game will be able to really differentiate itself from the other titles in the genre. There’s nothing about this genre that prevents it from having amazing characters and amazing stories–it’s just not really been explored yet.”
As for bringing on Brittain to write the script, Brown said Skins became so popular because of “the power of those characters,” and their interesting quirks and flaws.
“And that is Jamie’s superpower: It’s creating those characters that are flawed and actually a little bit weird–just like the rest of us–and through that we can empathize with them, we can fall in love with them.”
Amazon Games has pulled back of late, and this is just the latest example. Just this week, Amazon said it would end service for its newly launched game King of Meat. The company also sold its unreleased MOBA March of Giants to Ubisoft. Additionally, Amazon made cuts to its MMO teams, which is resulting in the forthcoming shutdown of New World and the cancellation of a Lord of the Rings MMO. Amazon Games boss Christoph Hartmann left the company earlier this year.
Amazon isn’t getting out of games entirely, though, as the company will publish the next two Tomb Raider games, and it remains heavily invested in gaming in other areas with its numerous adaptations of video games at Prime Video. Amazon’s biggest success so far in this department has been the Fallout TV show, with TV series based on God of War and Tomb Raider coming next.