The historic director of Amazon Games bows out

BRIEF // Mike Frazzini, one of the thinking heads of Amazon Games, the video game division of the Web giant, is leaving. This departure concludes ten years marked by some recent successes, but above all by countless failures.

A key figure in the Amazon Game Studios organization (initial name of Amazon Games) since its very first days of existence in 2012, Mike Frazzini hangs up his boots. His departure was confirmed by a representative of the company at the economic agency Bloomberg.

A historic employee of Amazon, where he was in charge of the book section before taking charge of video games, Frazzini had become the face of repeated failures at Amazon Game Studios, following an investigation published in January 2021 by Bloomberg also. Its inexperience in the video game market, as well as its methods too far from the usual practices of the industry, were pointed out by many employees there as the cause of the catastrophic balance sheet of the organization: in nearly ten years, it hadn’t launched a single major game yet — despite several hundred million dollars swallowed up and multiple cancellations, some of them particularly shattering (an MMORPG The Lord of the Rings developed in partnership with Tencent, or the game Cruciblepermanently withdrawn from sale just six weeks after its launch in the summer of 2020).

Ironically, Mike Frazzini’s departure comes just months after Amazon Games’ first-ever commercial success, the online role-playing game New World.