Amazon Games has announced that it is creating a new massively multiplayer online game based on The Lord of the Rings. The development is led by New world studio Amazon Games Orange County. This is an entirely new production, separate from a previous attempt at a Lord of the Rings MMO that was canceled by Amazon in 2021.
The game will be “an open-world MMO adventure in a persistent world set in Middle-earth, featuring the beloved stories of The Hobbit And Under the spell of the Ring literary trilogy,” said the Amazon press release. It’s early in development and probably several years away, but will be coming to PC and consoles. That’s it, in terms of details.
Amazon struck a deal with Under the spell of the Ring rights holder Middle-earth Enterprises, recently bought by Swedish conglomerate Embracer Group, to publish the game. Notably, Amazon has separate TV rights to JRR Tolkien’s work, but these rights don’t cover the Lord of the Rings core texts – hence the Prime Video show Power rings take place in a different, much earlier time frame.
This isn’t the only example of Amazon partnering with Embracer as a kind of backdoor to take ownership of a multimedia entertainment franchise. Amazon is reportedly planning to launch a TV show and movie based on Tomb Raider, and teamed up with studio Crystal Dynamics on a new game in the series. Embracer bought Crystal Dynamics and the rights to Tomb Raider from Square Enix last year and clearly sees Amazon as the right partner to help transform Lara Croft into a global multimedia franchise.
Amazon’s Lord of the Rings MMO won’t be the first game of its kind. The Lord of the Rings online launched in 2007 in the wake of World of Warcraft‘s huge success; it was quite good and is still in use today, although it never reached as large an audience as its inspiration.
Amazon is building quite a track record in the MMO space and has successfully launched its own New world and the western version of Smilegate’s Korean hit Lost Arkso it’s pretty well placed to make a success of a Lord of the Rings MMO – although getting licensed properties in the genre to work is notoriously tricky.
It’s certainly not the only iron Embracer has in the fire of games based on Tolkien. In February, Embracer said it expected to launch five games based on The Lord of the Rings within two years Gollum and EA’s mobile game Heroes of Middle-earth.