Amazon’s The Lord of The Rings MMO appears to have been canceled as part of major layoffs that severely impacted the company’s gaming division.

This week, Amazon confirmed it is no longer developing new content for its MMO, New World, amid widespread cuts affecting 14,000 roles across the company. According to a report by Bloomberg, these layoffs included “significant” reductions to Amazon’s video game operations, with development work scaled back and staff laid off primarily in its Irvine and San Diego offices. Bloomberg noted that Amazon is particularly scaling back on MMOs.

This raised concerns about The Lord of The Rings MMO. Now, a former Amazon Games developer affected by the cuts has suggested the game has been shelved.

“This morning I was part of the layoffs at Amazon Games, alongside my incredibly talented peers on New World and our fledgling Lord of The Rings game (y'all would have loved it),” the developer said in a now-deleted LinkedIn post.

“It’s always tough to see such a strong team go through something like this — I’ve been lucky to work with some of the most skilled, creative, and kind developers I’ve ever met here.”

The phrase “y'all would have loved it” strongly implies The Lord of The Rings MMO is no longer active. Neither Amazon nor The Lord of The Rings rights holder Embracer have responded to IGN’s request for comment.

Although The Lord of The Rings was announced in 2023, in August last year, Amazon Games boss Christoph Hartmann told IGN it was still early. "We're still trying to find the hook, find that idea of what it is because we don't just want to go and do the same thing over," Hartmann said at the time.

"While it's tempting sometimes with an existing IP, that's not the point of doing it. You've got to find a fresh twist, and we're still, I think, in that period where we really want to find out what could be the hook, what could be the thing which is different to all the other games out there. So it's a little bit early.”

In 2023, Embracer said it needed to be "exploiting Lord of The Rings in a very significant fashion" by turning it into “one of the biggest gaming franchises in the world.” Embracer bought the rights to The Lord of The Rings and The Hobbit in August 2022 and announced plans to explore opportunities to create new games, movies, and more based on the famous intellectual property soon after.

This isn’t the first time Amazon has canceled a Lord of The Rings MMO. In 2021, it halted a Lord of The Rings MMORPG that was first announced in 2019 amid a contract dispute with Tencent.