Amazon pressured one of its teams to develop an AI game, they scrambled to make it work - then got laid off anyway | Eurogamer.net

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Amazon pressured one of its teams to develop an AI game, they scrambled to make it work - then got laid off anyway

The story of Project Trident.

Image credit: Amazon Game Studios.

Feature

by Connor Makar<br>Staff Writer

Published on May 14, 2026

45 comments

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In October 2025, developers at Amazon Game Studios found out they had lost their jobs. They were far from alone; since the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, an unrelenting assault of layoffs has carved up many studios across the world. The reasons for that remain contested, from a sudden correction after the explosive growth of the pandemic, to ever-greater competition for eyeballs from the attention economy, or the simple lack of 'growth narrative', leading to crucial investors taking their money elsewhere. Regardless, at Amazon Game Studios the story was the same as it was at so many others: rooms of creatives, junior and senior, unceremoniously brought into meetings and locked out from company accounts. The mournful leitmotif of the times.

Many teams within the Amazon Games Studios umbrella were affected. New World, for instance, Amazon Games Studios' long lasting MMORPG, was dealt a fatal blow, its team's deconstruction coinciding with an end-of-life announcement for the project following its tenth season and last major update, Nighthaven.

{ e.preventDefault(); e.currentTarget.closest('.video_wrapper').innerHTML = e.currentTarget.querySelector('template').innerHTML; enableElements(); })(event)" title="Click to play video from YouTube"><br>New World - Official Trailer

You can watch a trailer for New World here, an Amazon MMO which will close down next year.Watch on YouTube

These we know about, but they were far from the only casualties. Another game was cancelled - and much of its team let go - despite showing promise internally, and despite its adherence to an increasingly popular games industry refrain: that game developers ought to be making games involving generative AI. Internally, this game was referred to as Project Trident.

According to sources spread across multiple Amazon Game Studios teams, who spoke to Eurogamer under condition of anonymity to protect their careers, Eurogamer can reveal an AI mandate was introduced to the developer as part of a company-wide push to use the technology - but it was not enough to save them from closure.

It's worth outlining how exactly Amazon Game Studios operated. Within the Amazon Game Studios umbrella, led at the time by vice president Christoph Hartmann, several core teams of developers were each working on major MMO projects such as New World, Lost Ark, and Throne and Liberty. Other teams worked across Amazon Luna titles such as Masters of the Universe: Legends Unite, or Courtroom Chaos starring Snoop Dogg, while the publishing arm still collaborated with certain projects, such as the recently announced Crystal Dynamics Lara Croft games (Crystal Dynamics has assured these projects remain on track, despite layoffs). Within all that, smaller teams were pitching and working on new projects, including Project Trident.

But when Amazon Game Studios announced layoffs last year, it did so alongside a drastic pivot away from big-budget internal development. A "significant amount" of internal triple-A development would halt as part of this, reportedly wrote Steven Boom in an internal memo at the time. This resulted in the San Diego-based Project Trident team, operating at the time under studio head Andy Sites, leaving alongside their peers across the company from the teams on New World, Lost Ark, and more. As for the Lord of the Rings MMO, that team "had like three people on it for the longest time," according to one source, "before they started moving New World devs to Lord of the Rings - and then everyone got laid off." After much speculation, this source confirmed to Eurogamer that Amazon's The Lord of the Rings MMO has also been cancelled, though Amazon itself claims it is in the process of making something with the IP.

By the time it was cancelled, Project Trident was a third-person action game in a comedy-focused nordic setting, where a fictional parody company called Valhalla Ventures hires the protagonist as part of a wider adventure.

It's a fun idea, but there's one very specific twist: as is clear from a substantial amount of gameplay footage reviewed by Eurogamer, its key quirk was its use of generative AI, enabling communication between the player and NPCs. While this included lighthearted chatter between the player and various characters outside of missions, it was also used within the missions as a key tool for combat and puzzle-solving.

During fights present in the gameplay footage, for instance, the player could command a character named...