Amazon is illustrating its commitment to game development with a new studio opening, despite its struggles to make a hit game in recent years. The company on Tuesday announced the new studio’s Montreal-based team, which will create original AAA games with an initial focus on a new online multiplayer title.
The new studio will be led by industry veterans who worked on Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege. Amazon Games’ Montreal studio is its fourth studio, with three other locations based in Seattle, San Diego, and Orange County.
“Building upon 8 years of experience with Siege, we are excited to start with a blank page and the creative freedom to create a completely unique experience in the multiplayer space,” said Xavier Marquis, the creative director of the new studio and one of its founding members hired from Ubisoft.
Amazon has struggled to make a name for itself in the game development space despite heavy investments in original titles and in-house studios. Most notably, the company pulled and then outright canceled its free-to-play hero shooter Crucible last year. Other struggles Amazon has faced include pulling its video game adaption of The Grand Tour from storefronts after releasing to poor reviews in 2019, and the delay of its other major original project, New World, to sometime later this year.
Those failures are not yet deterring incoming Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who expressed commitment to the company’s game development endeavors following a damning Bloomberg report about the division’s struggles. Jassy told employees in an email last month that he believes the game development division can thrive “if we hang in there.”
