According to Wccftech, Amazon Games has shut down its internal studios, sunsetting its MMO New World and canceling a major Lord of the Rings MMO project that had been in development since at least 2019. This leaves no publicly known major Western AAA MMO in active development, with the exception of a nebulous project at Riot Games. The news prompted interviews with three industry veterans: Greg Street (formerly of Blizzard and Riot, founder of the now-shuttered Fantastic Pixel Castle), Rich Vogel (a pioneer on Meridian 59 and Star Wars: The Old Republic), and Scott Hartsman (formerly of Trion Worlds). Their consensus is that the genre isn’t dead, but it’s become an incredibly tough sell, with development budgets ranging from RIFT‘s $50 million to Star Wars: The Old Republic‘s estimated $200 million, and modern publishers are increasingly risk-averse.
The Funding Problem
Here’s the thing: everyone still loves the *idea* of a successful MMO. A decade of steady revenue? That’s the dream. But the veterans point out the brutal reality. Greg Street nailed it: publishers get “nervous about the cost to commit.” You can’t start small. You need a huge world, tons of content, complex social systems, and robust servers—all before you get a single player. It’s a bet of hundreds of millions with a years-long payoff horizon. And in a market where even PvP games flop, that’s a terrifying proposition. Rich Vogel frames Amazon‘s move as a simple “strategic business decision.” California dev costs, post-pandemic market corrections—it just didn’t pencil out. So, is it dead? No. But it’s on life support, funded only by the existing giants.
The Innovation Trap
But let’s say you get the money. Then you hit the second wall, what Street calls the “innovation trap.” This is the killer. The core MMO audience, the folks still playing WoW or Guild Wars 2 or The Elder Scrolls Online, they have their habits. If your new game is too different, they’ll just stay put. But if you just make another WoW clone? Well, we saw how that worked out in the 2005-2014 “golden age.” A parade of expensive failures—Warhammer Online, Age of Conan, WildStar—proved you can’t just buy a franchise and copy homework. You have to attract new players without alienating the old. And that balance? It’s basically alchemy. The only recent successes, like Destiny or Warframe, started as something else and evolved into MMO-lites. They avoided the trap by not calling themselves MMOs at launch.
Where Do We Go From Here?
So what’s the path forward? The veterans point to evolution, not revolution. Vogel highlights how games like Destiny introduced shorter, respectful time commitments like Strikes. It’s about adapting the fantasy to modern play patterns, not asking players to quit their jobs. And maybe the future isn’t in AAA at all. Look at the sustained success of a sandbox like Albion Online, or the passionate community-driven development of something like Monsters and Memories. These are smaller, nimbler, and they serve their niche without needing 10 million subscribers. The demand is clearly there—New World hit nearly a million concurrent players at launch! But that demand is for a *good* game, not just a big-budget one. The lesson from Amazon isn’t that players left the genre. It’s that a giant budget and a famous IP mean nothing if the core game isn’t rock-solid from day one.
A Brutal Reckoning
I think the real takeaway is harsher. The Western AAA MMO, as a concept for a *new* game, is probably dead. The economics are broken. The audience is split and skeptical. And the few entities with the cash to try, like Amazon, just walked away after burning a fortune. The genre will live on through its enduring titans and smaller-scale passion projects. But the era of a studio greenlighting a $200 million, all-or-nothing WoW competitor? That’s over. And maybe that’s okay. It forces creativity. It means the next big thing in persistent online worlds might not look like an MMO at all. It’ll just be a great game that happens to connect us, without needing the “massively” label that now comes with a massively impossible price tag.
