Amazon cuts ties with Forza Horizon 5 director's upcoming open-world driving game as it focuses on Tomb Raider, cloud gaming platform Luna, and more

Amazon has announced that it will no longer be publishing the upcoming narrative-led open-world driving game currently in development at Maverick Games, a studio founded by Mike Brown, creative director on Forza Horizon 5. It does so as part of the company's mysterious and ongoing "strategic evolution."

Amazon's gaming arm has undergone a lot of changes over the last six months. In October, Amazon Game Studios announced 14,000 layoffs as part of "role reduction," which involved the cancellation of The Lord of the Rings MMO. The same month, it announced that its highly successful MMO New World would also be shut down, with an end date at the beginning of 2027 being set in January.

Last month, 16,000 more people lost their jobs, including studio head Cristoph Hartmann, and just yesterday, it was revealed that Amazon's online dungeon crawler King of Meat's servers would be shut down just seven months after launch. Now, the company has canceled another game release under its name.

The publishing agreement was originally announced back in May 2024, two years after the studio was founded, but according to The Game Business, the open-world driving game will now need to find a new publisher.

The statement made by a spokesperson for Amazon Game Studios reads, "As part of our strategic evolution to focus on projects that leverage Amazon's unique strengths and scale, including the recent re-launch of Luna and our Tomb Raider franchise partnership with Crystal Dynamics, we have decided to release Maverick Games from their publishing agreement with Amazon Game Studios.

"We have tremendous respect for the Maverick Games team and the compelling narrative-led driving experience they're creating," it continues. "This decision allows Maverick Games the flexibility to find a publishing partner whose strategic priorities are better aligned with bringing their game to market. We're proud of what we accomplished together during our partnership and wish them every success in the future."

Shutting everything down aside, we're still wondering what this "strategic evolution" is. Hopefully, a different publisher snaps up the narrative-led driving game sooner rather than later.

After 30,000 layoffs and a dead MMO, Amazon reportedly loses gaming exec who famously said games "don't really have acting"