Inside Amazon Games Chief’s Strategy to Build Up a Triple-A Threat With ‘Tomb Raider,’ ‘Lord of the Rings’ and Leaving Space for New IP (EXCLUSIVE)

variety.com:

Jennifer Maas TV Business Writer Amazon Games has been quiet for the past few years. So quiet you might not have even known Amazon was working on video games, especially compared to the amount of marketing Netflix’s gaming division is putting behind all its titles.

But six years after joining Amazon Games as vice president in 2018, Christoph Hartmann , the co-founder of video game publisher 2K, is finally ready to talk about what’s been going on behind closed doors, as the company approaches the September release of its free-to-play MMORPG “Throne and Liberty” and the October launch of the action RPG “New World: Aeternum,” both of which will be available on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S consoles.

First, however, he needs to emphasize the reason there hasn’t been much to say up until now: video games can take a long time to make — especially when you’re trying to leave a very good first impression. “The approach we took at Amazon is the long game,” Hartmann said. “Rather than going out on a buying frenzy and just collect studios — and you know how it is, it sometimes works out, but no one talks about the studio acquisitions which didn’t work out, but there’s actually far more than the ones which worked out — we said, let’s focus on internal and selective external games.

When you look from where we started to where we are now, we have now eight games in development, and we’re really going to start to get a more regular cadence of putting out games.