In 2011, Amazon opened the Amazon Appstore and started to hire developers for mobile social games. In 2012, Amazon Game Studios released Living Classics, a social game for Facebook. Amazon first announced that it would create computer games in 2014. Amazon recruited Kim Swift, Clint Hocking, and developers who previously worked on System Shock 2. Amazon sought to make games in-between the industry standards of small and large teams making casual and AAA games, respectively. Amazon Game Studios wanted to make teams of five to thirty people who would work on games for between a year and 18 months with a focus on "creativity" and "craftsmanship", whether the genre is for kids or hardcore gamers. Studio vice-president Mike Frazzini wanted to make projects like Minecraft, The Walking Dead, and The Room. The studio also wanted developers to impact the direction of their hardware, between its cloud services and Amazon-brand devices. For example, developers can offload processing to Amazon's cloud services and the Amazon Fire TV has expanded memory as a result of developer feedback. A lot of the company's developers left within a year of the company's founding. Amazon Game Studios went on to publish a number of mobile titles, including the horror gameLost Within. Two years after the studio's initial announcement, at the September 2016TwitchCon, the studio revealed its first three PC games: Breakaway, Crucible, and New World. Breakaway was a team-based brawler in which two teams of four fight to deliver a ball to their opponents' goal. It was designed for tight integration into Twitch, the streaming service Amazon acquired in 2014. Amazon Game Studios announced the cancellation of Breakaway in March 2018. Crucible is a 12-player, class-based game in which players form alliances to become the last man standing. An additional player will direct the game, letting viewers interact with the game's elements and triggering in-game events. New World is a massively multiplayersandbox game with a supernatural colonial America theme. Players can form settlements, fight each other, or fight monsters out in the world. Crucible launched on May 20, 2020, while New World releases sometime in 2021 after a 2nd pushback date was announced on July 10, 2020. In August 2018, Christoph Hartman, co-founder of video game publisher2K Games – a wholly subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive – became the new Vice President of Amazon Game Studios replacing Mike Frazzini. The company has three game development studios in San Diego, Seattle, and Orange County. In June 2019, during E3 week it was announced that layoffs hit the company. At this time it is unknown how many people were impacted. However, "multiple" unannounced projects had been cancelled. The company has been involved with a Lord of the Rings MMO since the middle of 2019.
