As Amazon makes a further 16,000 company-wide layoffs following 14,000 job cuts in October, Amazon Game Studios has reportedly lost its studio head, Christoph Hartmann.
Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier reports that Hartmann, previously head of 2K, “is leaving the company.”
You may also remember Hartmann as the studio head who said, in 2024, the year after Baldur’s Gate 3 won a zillion game of the year awards and the year before Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 did the same, that games “don’t really have acting.” He made this claim in the middle of a video game actor strike over AI protections.
“When we talk about AI, first of all, hopefully it will help us to have new gameplay ideas, which has nothing to do with taking work away from anyone,” he said at the time. “And especially for games, we don’t really have acting… The majority of the team sits in programming and that’s not going to go away because that’s all about innovation. If it takes something, it will be really the boring parts.”
Per IGN, Amazon later said “we regret the confusion” over these remarks, calling actors “essential creative contributors.”
Amazon Game Studios has done just about everything possible to distance itself from the prospect of making games. Hartmann’s reported exit comes on the heels of the delisting and end of service date for New World, once Amazon’s claim to fame in the MMO space.
AGS was hit hard by the company’s October layoffs. An internal memo relayed explicit direction to end a “significant amount” of first-party MMO development amid renewed emphasis on the cloud streaming service Luna, which absorbed Prime Gaming and relaunched in October alongside such titles as Courtroom Chaos: Starring Snoop Dogg.
Former exec admits Amazon tried and failed to beat Steam, says the company “needed to build something dramatically better” but “gamers already had the solution” in Valve’s store.
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