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Taking a break from Dyson Sphere Program (Literally, I play this every spare minute), I decided to look up some old school gaming information and came across something I had not heard about previously.
Lord of The Rings is getting an epicly long television series on Amazon at some point. I like the idea – the family has transitioned to adult television so I don’t watch many shows with the kids anymore; watching this with them would be awesome. The gaming angle is that Amazon Game Studios is going to develop some kind of an MMO for Lord of the Rings.
Now – there is an existing Lord of the Rings Online game, fantastic for its time (2007), but which I find interminable today. Is its license about to be cancelled or revoked ? Or is it simply going to compete directly with whatever shadowy project Amazon may release someday ?
Amazon Game Studios hasn’t exactly captured the PC / Mobile game market, their offering Crucible came out and then was immediately pulled from the market – not a move that inspires confidence for me. I do not want to invest money or mindshare in games that disappear like that. Bloomberg throws up a report about them that was apparently so bad, Amazon felt the need to respond to them.
One thing that interests me is how little we’ve heard from John Smedley lately, ex-CEO of SOE and apparently one of the big mucky-mucks at Amazon Game Studios. I’ve tried to keep track of him since this dude is in my generation and touching on the same nerd-points I always seem to. He is reputed to be working on a secretive project, so putting all this information together……
Would we end up with a John Smedley – led team developing Lord of the Rings Amazon at this point ? A new MMO take on LOTR would be something that would interest me greatly.
My best source for LOTRO hasn’t covered this one so I’ve no idea how accurate my speculation is or if there’s more to the story.
To Game For Life 
There was a good deal of speculation about some of this a year or two ago. As far as I recall it was established reasonably firmly that whatever Amazon is doing with Lord of the Rings won’t directly affect SSG’s license with the Tolkein estate. There was some detail about how far that had been extended, I think, but I forget the details. The gist of it was that the Tolkein people are happy to have more than one iteration of the IP in this genre. Speculation was that the death of Christopher Tolkein might have substantively changed attitudes to monetization but who knows?
Of course, the impact on LotRO’s ability to attract and hold players is going to depend on just how appealing and successful the competing game might be. And how popular the show is. If the show were to tank, I guess it could damage LotRO although I doubt it. The IP is far too well-established for one bad adaptation to damage it. If the game was amazing, though, that could definitely hurt them.
As for Smed, if you find out what he’s up to, please share. A lot of people would like to know!
Thanks for the good info that didn’t come up on easy Google searches.
Nowadays Gaming is so widespread that it’s unlikely to be a problem having more than one Lord of the Rings Online Ver 2 or whatever they will call it. Problem, that is, for the people who license this stuff and run the games. This will be interesting.
All I’ve been able to figure out about Smed is he’s still a big exec with Amazon, and working on producing whatever game(s) which no details have been shared about. He declined to be interviewed by Bloomberg.