According to GameSpot, Amazon Game Studios head Christoph Hartmann is leaving the company. This news, reported by Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, comes on the same day Amazon announced a massive new round of layoffs impacting around 16,000 employees. This follows a previous round last October that cut 14,000 jobs. Hartmann, who co-founded 2K Games and worked on the original Grand Theft Auto, was brought on in 2018. Amazon is winding down its AAA game development, shifting focus to its Luna cloud gaming service. Its own MMO, New World, will be shut down for good at the end of January 2027.
The gaming graveyard
Look, Amazon’s gaming story is basically a case study in how money can’t buy you love—or a hit game. They threw mountains of cash at it. They hired industry veterans like Hartmann. And what do they have to show for it? A string of high-profile flops. Crucible was such a disaster it went from launch back to beta before being canned. Their big internal hope, New World, had a flash-in-the-pan moment and is now on a slow march to a 2027 shutdown. A Lord of the Rings MMO? Seems dead. Publishing Korean MMOs like Lost Ark gave them a pulse, but it’s not the industry-defining success they wanted.
The pivot to AI and Luna
So what’s the plan now? Amazon is doing a hard pivot. They’re ditching the expensive, years-long AAA development grind. Instead, the focus is on casual, social, and frankly, gimmicky party games for their Luna cloud service. We got the clearest signal of this direction last October with the announcement of Courtroom Chaos: Starring Snoop Dogg, an AI-powered party game. It’s a stark contrast to their original ambitions. The strategy seems to be: use quirky, low-commitment titles to lure people into the Luna ecosystem, where the real business is subscription fees. It’s a retreat, repackaged as a refocus.
Hartmann’s ironic exit
There’s a pretty rich irony in Hartmann’s departure. This is the guy who, not that long ago, made headlines by saying AI wouldn’t take jobs in games because games “don’t really have acting.” Now, he’s out of a job as his former company leans into AI-powered game development as its future. It feels symbolic. Amazon’s first gaming era, built on traditional studio models and big-budget bets, is over. The new era is about cloud infrastructure, AI tools, and bite-sized content. Hartmann was a figure from the old world. His exit makes the transition official.
What it really means
Here’s the thing: this isn’t just about one executive leaving. It’s the final admission that Amazon’s blueprint for conquering gaming was fundamentally broken. They thought they could Amazon their way in—outspend, out-hire, out-scale. But games aren’t logistics or web services. They’re messy, creative, and unpredictable. The layoffs and this leadership vacuum tell you everything. The grand experiment in AAA development is done. Amazon Games will live on as a publisher for a few external projects (like the upcoming Tomb Raider games) and a factory for Luna content. But the dream of being a next-generation game studio powerhouse? It’s been cancelled. Just like Crucible.
