Amazon Games Boss Wants Studio To Be “The Best Games Publisher Out There”

Six years after joining Amazon Games in 2018, the studio’s vice president, Christoph Hartmann, has laid out a long-term goal for the company to become the best it possibly can. Hard at work with the upcoming Lord of the Rings MMO and Crystal Dynamics’ next Tomb Raider game, Hartmann states these titles aren’t “too far away” but that they are playing the “long game” and want to focus their efforts on game quality rather than coming in with a half-baked approach.

Dreaming big, and why the hell not, Hartmann envisions Amazon Games’ future as taking pole position to become “the best games publisher out there.”

Amazon Games Want To Play “The Long Game”

Speaking in an interview with Variety’s Jennifer Maas, Hartmann, who was a co-founder and former president of 2K Games, spoke about Amazon’s upcoming Tomb Raider and The Lord of the Rings games by giving a realistic scope on when they would become available but also making sure that players knew that the studio would be prioritizing the importance of game quality, first and foremost. “It’s not going to be tomorrow, but it’s not too far away,” Harmann explained. “It’s all about quality. You don’t want to just be rushed out. That doesn’t work. It has to be triple-A quality because the bar is so high.”

In what seemed to be a slight dig at the big companies who gobbled up studios and then were unable to manage them, Hartmann discussed Amazon’s “long game” strategy for the future in terms of putting out more games over the coming years and seemingly not wanting to ‘bite off more than one can chew’.

“The approach we took at Amazon is the long game. Rather than going out on a buying frenzy and just collect studios — and you know how it is, it sometimes works out, but no one talks about the studio acquisitions which didn’t work out, but there’s actually far more than the ones which worked out — we said, let’s focus on internal and selective external games.” Hartmann goes on to state that the studio currently has eight games in development, and will be starting “to get a more regular cadence of putting out games” but believes that the sweet spot on making sure the studio doesn’t get overwhelmed is to “focus on maybe two, three games a year.”

Praising Prime Video’s successful run with shows like Fallout and The Boys, Harmann wants Amazon Games to join in on the victory, as this is the missing piece of the puzzle, and become “the best publisher out there”. “For me personally, I always want us to be the best games publisher out there, in the long run, or at least one of the best publishers out there. But really, when you see also what it does for Amazon, with Amazon becoming much more of an entertainment company, you see the success Prime Video is having. And there’s music, there’s Audible. And one piece which was missing is games, and so we’re really part of that bigger entertainment family.”

If you always fancied the idea of playing Xbox games but didn’t want to fork out for a console, Xbox has revealed its plans to launch the Xbox app on Amazon Fire TV Stick, which will allow players to use Xbox Game Pass Ultimate cloud streaming to play on their TVs at a “great low-cost, convenient, and portable option to enjoy a huge library of incredible games.”

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