Amazon Game Studios Cancels its First Game, Breakaway

Breakaway, Amazon Game Studios' first planned game, is cancelled. Amazon planned to uplift its online multiplayer brawler from alpha to a live release sometime in 2019, but the whole shebang was swept off the board on March 31.

Amazon Game Studios announced Breakaway is "no longer in active development" over on the game's subreddit. "Since our last announcement, we have worked to implement community feedback and iterate on Breakaway's core gameplay," writes the official Amazon Game Studios reddit account. "While we have developed many ideas and made a lot of progress, we are also setting a very high bar for ourselves. In spite of our efforts, we didn't achieve the breakthrough that made the game what we all hoped it could be. After a lot of soul searching, the team decided to focus on new ideas."

Amazon Game Studios says it'll be focusing its efforts elsewhere, most likely the other two games the studio announced at Twitch Con 2016. One game, New World, is an sandbox survival MMO wherein players try to colonize early an North America crawling with horrors of ancient legend. The other game, Crucible, plops 12 players into an arena while a 13th player, a "game master," streams the event and sets up challenges with the help of audience participation. Players can choose to turn on each other or help one another out. Given the current frenzy around battle royale games, Crucible's twists on the formula might wind up a big winner on Twitch.

Former USGamer writer Bob Mackey went hands-on with Breakaway in 2016 and said the game certainly had promise. Unfortunately, sometimes even promising games are put to sleep before they manage to reach their full potential. That's the way she goes.