It's no secret that Amazon Games had been working on some version of a Lord of the Rings MMO, although the game had already been cancelled once due to contract disputes , and the second version, which was being worked on in conjunction with Embracer , hasn't been seen or heard from in a while. The recent news of Amazon's mass layoffs shift towards casual games , and specifically away from MMOs and AAA games, raised questions about the future of the Lord of the Rings MMO, however Amazon had—and still hasn't—made an official proclamation regarding the game's demise.

Ashley Amrine, a software engineer affected by those Amazon Gaming layoffs has more or less confirmed, in a now-deleted LinkedIn post (via Rock Paper Shotgun ), that the Lord of the Rings MMO has seemingly been cancelled. In her post addressing the fact that she had been laid off, Ashleigh Amrine, a former engineer at Amazon Games, wrote: "This morning I was part of the layoffs at Amazon Games, alongside my incredibly talented peers on New World and our fledgling Lord of the Rings game (y'all would have loved it)." Her revelation suggests that it would still have been a while before the new MMO launched, but it was previously described as "open-world MMO adventure in a persistent world set in Middle-earth, featuring the beloved stories of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings literary trilogy" when it was first announced. The team working on the game was the same one that had been responsible for New World, which, despite its hiccups, seemed to have largely been a success, managing to hold onto a fairly impressive ~35,000 daily players on Steam alone.