A recent memo from Amazon Games VP Christoph Hartmann reveals that the company’s gaming division will be laying off more than 100 employees. The employees affected belong to Prime Gaming, Game Growth, and the San Diego studio.
According to the memo sent to workers on Tuesday by Hartmann the layoffs are a result of the business’s continual attempts to restructure and optimize its operations.
“After evaluating our current projects against our long-term goals, the Games leadership team made the difficult decision to eliminate just over 100 roles across Prime Gaming, Game Growth and in our San Diego studio, while also reassigning some employees to other projects that match our strategic focus,” the memo from Hartmann read, as reported by CNBC.
“Going forward, we will continue to invest in our internal development efforts, and our teams will continue to grow as our projects progress,” Hartmann added.
Meanwhile, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said last month that the business would be letting go of an extra 9000 workers in an effort to cut down on expenses. In a previous round of cuts, the company had slashed 18,000 jobs.
The report states that the affected employees are being informed about their termination through live meetings. The company said that it will be providing severance pay, health insurance benefits, outplacement services, and paid time to allow the employees a chance to look for another job.
Despite having a sizeable number of published games and hiring top talent from companies like Sony Online Entertainment, Amazon Games has only been able to achieve moderate success since its launch in 2013. Incidentally, the company also cancelled ‘Crucible’ in 2020 which was supposed to be its big budget game.
Despite that, the company still saw some success with its games New World and Lost Ark due to lack of enough options in the MMO genre for gaming enthusiasts. However, the hype settled down rather quickly due to the unnecessarily complex mechanisms in the games which consumed a lot more time and several bot farmers.
Hartmann has reassured that Amazon would “double down on the pre-production phase” of the games and will also keep growing its Montreal studio, which is currently working on an unnamed project.