As we all know, Amazon Games has not had the greatest track record in the video games industry. In September of 2016, the company announced three games: Breakaway, Crucible, and New World. Breakaway never reached the point of having a release date and was canceled in 2018, and Crucible launched in 2020 only to be sent straight back into beta and get scrapped shortly after. Let’s not also forget that The Lord of the Rings MMO was also canceled back in April this year.
Needless to say, the outlook for New World was not good, at least initially. In an interview with GamesIndustry, the vice president of Amazon Games, Christoph Hartmann, explains that he thinks people wrote New World off due to the company’s history of failures:
I think New World is coming out of left field for many people because I think they wrote it off, I think they thought it was never going to happen. I see a lot of enthusiasm for games within the company, a lot of support -- and that's increasing, rather than people getting fed up with it. There's many businesses that weren't a home run from the beginning and just kept going and going for it. I have no indication that the company is getting tired of its gaming division, I just see support left and right. And once we deliver a big hit, which I think New World will be, we'll just get even more support because we've proven ourselves.
It seems that the history of Amazon Games has not swayed Hartmann towards a negative mindset in the slightest. In his mind, the company is simply taking its time, and it learned from past mistakes that won’t be relevant going forward. He explains, “We launched Crucible at a time when PUBG and Fortnite were super, super big. It was not the right decision to go into a market segment that has such big players everyone's always chasing. It's like trying to beat Call of Duty at its peak, or trying to do another Grand Theft Auto.” With New World, the game will be shipped “only when it’s ready,” and only at the best possible time.