The Lord of the Rings MMO canceled by Amazon?

Recently, the announcement by Amazon Game Studios of the imminent - not better defined - closure of its game New World: Aeternum caused quite a stir, coming shortly after the launch of a new expansion and leaving many old and new users anything but speechless.

Today we learn that Amazon's internal resource cuts, the main reason behind the decision not to continue supporting the game and, within a year, to close its servers, may have gone so deep as to undermine the realization of another game highly anticipated by fans: The Lord of the Rings MMO, or The Lord of the Rings as you wish.

One of the former employees, in fact, reportedly published a post on Reddit - now deleted, but reported by IGN - with the following message: "I was hit by Amazon Games layoffs this morning, along with my talented New World and nascent Lord of the Rings game (you would have loved it!) colleagues." That conditional in parentheses seems to specify, more than the rest of the sentence, that with the layoffs the project was filed away and put through the shredder.

The One Ring and the game that won't be made

The Lord of the Rings MMO was announced by Amazon in cooperation with Embracer Group in 2023 after the platform had canceled an MMORPG with the same setting in 2019. Considering that Embracer also has a less-than-enviable series of cancellations in its history, it's not surprising that the two companies decided to scrap the project without even letting us know.

...we can only await clarification...