amazon-games-boss-steps-down

Officially, the main man behind New World, has stepped down for family reasons.

With all things considered, Amazon Games hasn't had a great time recently. Without the gargantuan success of Lost Ark keeping their head above water, it could be said that their efforts to capitalise on the gaming market so far have been subpar at best, or an unmitigated failure at worst. Anyway, in other news, Amazon Games boss Mike Frazzini is stepping down to focus on his family.

Frazzini began his Amazon career managing the books section of the ubiquitous website. It was there that he caught the attention of big pappa Bezos, who realised that nerds like both books and video games and therefore decided Frazzini was the perfect guy to become the Amazon Games boss.

A Bloomberg report details what was to follow. According to current and former employees of Amazon Games, Frazzini ignored the advice of (actual) devs, told staff that every Amazon game needed to be a "billion-dollar franchise" only to under-staff projects and insist on using in-house development tools that rarely ever worked properly to save money.

A sequence of setbacks then commenced over the last few years. These included:

• The immediate failure of their first project, The Grand Tour Game in 2019
• The backpedalling on Crucible's release and subsequent shut-down
• Two unreleased attempts at games inspired by Fortnite and League of Legends

Then came New World, which for a moment looked like the ace up their sleeve. But a sluggish mid-game, multiple bugs and a game-breaking gold exploit drove fans away to such an extent that their active player base has seen more than a 90% drop since launch. A drop-off is always on the cards, but that number has gotta hurt.

We're sure that the devs responsible for these failures have been sacked for their incompetence, however. Meaning that we can perhaps look to a brighter future in New World , if they can pull off a 'Realm Reborn'.