I’m not understanding. As this is the first I’ve ever heard of this, I went to their site and it looks like freebies for games you play and games from other developers.

Did Amazon make their own games? If not, what were these 180 workers doing exactly?

[–] potterpockets@sh.itjust.works 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They made New World and were supposedly working on a LOTR MMO.

[–] drcobaltjedi@programming.dev 9 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Didn't New Worlds turn into a ghost town month after launch?

[–] potterpockets@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah it cratered pretty hard, but they have been adding content to the game. Launch was a buggy clusterfuck.

[–] Selmafudd@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

I played at launch and yeah the bugs is what drove most people away. They were exploited pretty hard, there was like a 4 or 5 day period there where 3 seperate dupes were discovered and they didn't do any roll backs

[–] neshura 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not entirely well versed in the New World Saga but from what I've heard and read here's roughly what happened:

The dev team was developing a hardcore always-on PvP MMO, which is fine but not for everyone
Playtest rolls around and the devs get back player numbers you would expect for a hardcore PvP MMO
Speculation: the higher ups really don't like the projected return on their investment given the abysmal (for their ideas) player numbers and force the Studio to pivot to PvE content
At this point the entire game has been designed around PvP and the devs now have only ~1 year to somehow shove PvE content in there
Launch comes and since the devs had to spend all available time on forcing in PvE content what is present is buggy and doesn't fit the game mechanics
Ensue several months of panicked back and forth patching of the game by the devs, making the entire mess worse because everyone is pissed by one change or another

[–] Zikeji@programming.dev 5 points 1 year ago

To be fair, a lot of the game breaking launch bugs that hurt the game for me were with PVP (specifically, the instanced wars). I do know there were others but those PVP bugs are what I'll always remember. The lag, the broken healing, the hatchet exploit, and a few others.

[–] Pika@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I bought new world, never actually played it, I had tried the beta and said well this seems cool and got it then never played it at launch

[–] LiveLM@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 year ago

Might wanna get to it eventually before Amazon shuts it down

[–] altima_neo@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 year ago

Cuz it was killing gpus

[–] scottywh@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

The article has the answers.