Inside Amazon Games Chief’s Strategy to Build Up a Triple-A Threat With ‘Tomb Raider,’ ‘Lord of the Rings’ and Leaving Space for New IP (EXCLUSIVE)

Courtesy of Amazon

Amazon Games has been quiet for the past few years. So quiet you might not have even known Amazon was working on video games, especially compared to the amount of marketing Netflix’s gaming division is putting behind all its titles.

But six years after joining Amazon Games as vice president in 2018, Christoph Hartmann , the co-founder of video game publisher 2K, is finally ready to talk about what’s been going on behind closed doors, as the company approaches the September release of its free-to-play MMORPG “Throne and Liberty” and the October launch of the action RPG “New World: Aeternum,” both of which will be available on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S consoles.

First, however, he needs to emphasize the reason there hasn’t been much to say up until now: video games can take a long time to make — especially when you’re trying to leave a very good first impression.

“The approach we took at Amazon is the long game,” Hartmann said. “Rather than going out on a buying frenzy and just collect studios — and you know how it is, it sometimes works out, but no one talks about the studio acquisitions which didn’t work out, but there’s actually far more than the ones which worked out — we said, let’s focus on internal and selective external games. When you look from where we started to where we are now, we have now eight games in development, and we’re really going to start to get a more regular cadence of putting out games. But I’m also someone who believes that you really just can focus on maybe two, three games a year.”

That means that he unfortunately has nothing he can say about Amazon’s upcoming “Tomb Raider” and “The Lord of the Rings” video games (Except when there’s news: “It’s not going to be tomorrow, but it’s not too far away.) But Hartmann has plenty to reveal about Amazon’s strategy and philosophy for focusing on Triple-A titles and becoming “the best game publisher out there.”

But there’s an uphill battle ahead.

“Amazon Games is a bit of an odd fit for Amazon proper for a few reasons,” NYU Stern School of Business professor and video game industry expert Joost van Dreunen said. “The creative process of making games is messy and it’s increasingly built around longer-term service based offerings. So what that means is that while it’s very easy for Amazon or for Netflix or for Apple to buy movies and spend $30 billion on TV shows or get the rights to stream a Hollywood production on their video platforms — that’s a discrete purchase that you go, you buy it and then it’s yours for some limited amount of time. With games, you have to develop it, but even if you purchase them, you still have to account for the fact that you have to cater to the audience on a regular basis. Games have transitioned to these live services games, where people don’t just play by themselves, they play with other people, they have all these different things they can do inside of games, and so it’s a very different model of creating content for your platform. I can see a portfolio approach in Amazon for TV series, music, sports franchises and Hollywood productions being a much easier internal sell, because it’s discrete purchases, discrete investments, as opposed to, we’re going to spend all this money on a free-to-play title and try to keep it alive post-release by releasing additional content for years to come. It’s a very different animal to live in the Amazon universe.”

It’s the company’s approach to transmedia IP that could make or break Amazon Games’ success, according to Dreunen, who points to how well the “Fallout” TV series did for Amazon, while noting it’s Microsoft’s Bethesda Game Studio that profits from how well the existing game franchise did in return.

“I think they have an interesting point in that they take it on a multi-tiered perspective,” he said. “They’re developing and they are publishing a bunch of different projects at the same time and what they are learning and what they’re realizing more recently is the importance of a position where they can do amazing things, provided they own the IP. And so we saw in the case of the ‘Fallout’ series, which is intellectual property owned by Microsoft, it was big success and so all this viewership — but then all the playing and in game spending goes directly to Microsoft. And so you can see a world where Amazon would do well to release a game simultaneously available to play on PC, console, mobile, as well as launching a TV series or an animation on its Prime Video service. So finding the appropriate content that matches its different capabilities and pushing audiences into different directions across its ecosystem of activities and services, that’s going to be part of Amazon Games’ new program. And its acquisitions and the growth of its team, both in the US and internationally, have suggested that path.”

See Variety‘s full interview with Hartmann below.

What is the mission of Amazon Games, and what are you looking to make?

For me personally, I always want us to be the best games publisher out there, in the long run, or at least one of the best publishers out there. But really, when you see also what it does for Amazon, with has Amazon becoming much more of an entertainment company, you see the success Prime Video is having. And there’s music, there’s Audible. And one piece which was missing is games, and so we really part of that bigger entertainment family.

You’re just starting to open up now about what you’ve been up to and what you’re releasing soon. Why now?

As you know, it takes such a long time to make games. Now, it’s five years, if not longer. And the approach we took at Amazon is the long game. Rather than going out on a buying frenzy and just collect studios — and you know how it is, it sometimes works out, but no one talks about the studio acquisitions which didn’t work out, but there’s actually far more than the ones which worked out — we said, let’s focus on internal and selective external games. When you look from where we started to where we are now, we have now eight games in development, and we’re really going to start to get a more regular cadence of putting out games. But I’m also someone who believes that you really just can focus on maybe two, three games a year.

You’ve just announced you’re launching NCSOFT’s free-to-play MMORPG “Throne and Liberty” in North and South America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan in September. How did that deal come about and what is Amazon Games’ involvement in the creative on a project like that?

It’s done by NCSOFT, a very, very huge, huge, huge Korean developer and publisher. And it’s really a partnership we did where they manage everything on the home turf, and we take care of the publishing outside of Korea on all platforms. It’s the first multiplatform title we have, so there will be a lot of learnings for us, but it really fits us with our strategy. Because when we started off saying, OK, so what games should we do? I said, when you look at the different genres, MMO is actually a pretty underserved genre. There hasn’t been a lot of new things, because it would be pretty stupid to say, hey, let’s do a soccer game, let’s do a basketball game, it would have not sounded like a smart plan. So we went strategically into MMO’s when there was an opportunity and NCSOFT came to us and said, hey, if you want to work together, after the success you have seen of us working together with Smilegate — that really falls into our strategy, where we started off going into MMOs. But obviously now we kind of have a foot, also with “New World,” in that genre and it’s expanding our world into other genres. But it’s a huge, huge game.

How are you working through what games you can and can’t do based on Amazon-related IP. For example, “The Boys” is a hugely popular Amazon Prime Video show — but it’s produced by Sony Pictures Television, meaning if a video game were in the works there, Sony’s PlayStation Studios would more than likely be the first choice to work on that.

There’s two things: the one you want and what’s available. It’s not always as straightforward as you have one show that you own all the rights from all the other ones. But it’s a big part of transmedia for us. Obviously, we want to work much closer together, and we’ll be working much closer together with the different entertainment areas Amazon and a very natural one is Prime Video. You see it with “Tomb Raider,” where we’re gonna have a “Tomb Raider” game coming and they’re doing a show. And some people say, “Oh, will they be linked together?” And I give them the example, look at “Spider-Man.” There’s amazing, amazing games. There’s great animated content, there’s great live-action, and everyone seems to be very happy with that. So it does not need to be always that everything is mingled together, but it’s really one brand, which really just shows for me why transmedia nowadays is so important, and how games is such a vital part. When you see what Marvel created, it was based on comics, a pretty old form of entertainment, and what was created there. But I think games are such a big part of the entertainment world now they’re the most modern source to be part of that. And in a world where there’s such a huge offering of entertainment with streaming and music, there’s so much, it’s very hard to identify what you want. So IP is becoming more important.

Imagine there’s 24 bottles of cola and there’s Coca Cola — you steer towards that. And that’s why I think especially transmedia makes sense. And Amazon is really, really well set up when you look at the different pieces we have. So there’s collaboration, but it’s not as straightforward. It also has to make sense as a game. Remember around the 2000s, it was a big business that every movie, every TV show was turned into a game. You wouldn’t believe it, it’s a secret, people didn’t know I worked on a “Dora the Explorer” game. And it actually sold! But those those days are over, so you really have to be the right property that it makes sense as a game. “Fallout” is a great example. It was an amazing, amazing TV show that Prime Video put together. And when you look at the data, the sales numbers went up dramatically, even for us. It was available as a download on Prime Gaming and you could stream it on Luna and it was record breaking for us. That’s really a big part of the future, and games plays a really, really vital role — both ways, as a source, as well as an extension of an existing IP.

Where do you want to see Amazon Games at in five years?

I would like to have some games where we work very closely together with Prime Video. I want to work on some existing big IPs. But what I also want to do, what is very rare, is I don’t want to fall in the trap of, once we have one or two major franchises to stop doing the other ones. Because when you look at the big, traditional publishers, they have 50%, 60%, 70% of their revenue coming from a single game, and then they maybe have a second game, and then it stops and they’re not doing new IP. That’s actually one reason I came to Amazon because we want to keep on innovating. We still want to do new IPs. We still want to create new things, and that’s really the difference we want to make in the long run. We don’t want to be afraid in saying, hey, we have a hit now, let’s stop everything else. We want to help to make it great, but never forget, those things fade away and there will be another day, and it will be another time where people want something new.

How do you see AI affecting the gaming industry at large and Amazon in particular over the next few years?

We as a gaming industry, from all the entertainment forms, will have the biggest impact from AI. In all the other forms, it will be very, very transitional in the way things are produced. But that’s going to be very much behind the walls, because people see the results, but it’s still going to be a movie, a TV show. There will be improvements, it will go faster, quality goes up. But what we can do within games and what we are aiming for at Amazon, it’s all built around the gamer. Everything is about customization in the world. And we really want to put the gamer in the center and make games where you can customize the game in a way where it feels very personal. It could be simple things from art style or story, but there’s a lot of other things.

Take “League of Legends,” that’s not necessarily a game you’re gonna start off when you get to the gaming world, because someon’s going to yell at you, get out of my game. But imagine using AI to get trained up, having an artificial mentor who helps you, who learns your playing behavior, and guides you so you can compete, you actually can play. So it will enable us to bring new consumers to gaming who may be afraid to play those more sophisticated games. And I think it will be a huge, huge transition.

So far, the gaming industry has been driven by hardware. Every new console generation enabled us to make games, but the driver really was the hardware. I think they’re shifting now. The hardware will get better and better, but the improvement is a little bit slower than it was between PlayStation and PlayStation 2. I think the new improvement is going to be on the software side. AI will define your game in the future. And we at Amazon as a company are perfectly set up to go and become a major player in that space.

While Amazon has been growing its games division, Netflix has been building out its roster of video games as well, beginning with many mobile games and no recent updates yet regarding their longterm Triple-A plans. Why is Amazon focused on Triple-A over than mobile games?

There’s a huge difference there. On mobile games, there’s two reasons. When you really look at the mobile market, there have not been any new games or big games in the last couple of years, because people are so heavily invested. They’ve committed so much time, money also, in games. So it’s going to be very hard for them to leave. So it’s even more than in the Triple-A console world, the winner takes all. It’s very hard to break through. Plus the market is mainly free to play, so you go in and play it a little bit, then you go back to the game you played before. So it’s very, very, very hard to enter that market, because it’s really down to a couple of IPs. And I think it’s just much more opportunities for the market to be on the PC market, on the console market, because people play for a while and go on, but really take it seriously. And then it’s also personal reason. My background comes from Take-Two. I spent a while at Rockstar and then founded 2K. I haven’t done mobile games. If the company would say, Christoph, let’s do mobile games, I would have to hire someone. But I still believe it really, really is about Triple-A games, because otherwise it’s a very hard market to get into.

How are you looking at release schedules for Amazon’s upcoming game titles over the next couple years, and are you avoiding the windows for key competitor titles, like Rockstar’s “GTA 6” coming in Fall 2025?

It depends. There’s nothing like “GTA” for me, also having helped out on the first couple of ones on the marketing side, obviously, for me, the Holy Grail and part of my youth and I will always love it dearly. Games which are open world, which are similar, they probably should stay away. But an MMO, that’s a very different game. With the “New World” console version, it’s a very unique game coming to console. There’s not much comparable out there. And so why would you steer away? I mean, everyone’s probably gonna buy “GTA 6,” and it’s probably gonna store 110% average or Metacritic, and it probably deserves it. But that doesn’t mean nothing else should ship. Yes, you probably don’t want to ship day and date, and you probably want to give it a little bit of time. But let’s say a game comes, gamers might not buy it in October, but they could buy it in January.

What is Amazon’s strategy when it comes to monetization of its video games?

There’s two sets of games: free to play, which we have, and then games you get charged for. What’s really important is the spirit we live in, which is what I personally believe, but it also fits perfectly with our parent company, is that monetization is always fair and it feels you get real value. I want people always to step away and say, “Maybe it was not totally what I wanted, but they treated me fair. I didn’t pay too much. They didn’t try to exploit me. There’s no pay to win.” And that’s very important that the consumer, the gamer can accept. But yes, obviously you have to make money. I know there’s a world where people ideally have games for free — but with 200 people working for five years, they can’t be for free. But monetization, the most important thing for me is to make it fair. I think fair and perceived value are the two most important things. People spend a lot of money for things they like, so it’s really our job to deliver the quality and what people like.

What can you tell me about when we’ll hear more on the new “Tomb Raider” and “The Lord of the Rings” games, and when those titles will be released?

It’s not going to be tomorrow, but it’s not too far away. As I said, we’re getting into a much more regular cadence of shipping games. That’s all I’m allowed to tell you right now… It’s all about quality. You don’t want to just be rushed out. That’s doesn’t work. It has to be Triple-A quality, because the bar is so high.

How does Amazon Games compare to other gaming companies right now in terms of growth and hiring amid the recent industrywide layoffs?

We’re actually investing right now. We opened up a studio in Bucharest. There’s lots of good talent in Eastern Europe and lots of good games coming from there. Now we have the studio in Montreal, which I keep growing. So we are actually in a phase where we are expanding heavily with our internal studios. We’re looking at other games as well. I don’t know, it sounds almost ethically, probably the wrong answer, but with all the changes going on the industry, it’s a good opportunity for us to find talent. Because when you look at the market, during peak Covid times, when it was an absolute hiring and buying frenzy, it was very hard for us to get talent, because everyone wanted to work on the really big established things. And now it’s a great opportunity for us going in. We believe in the long run. Look at the stock market and that psychology. A stock goes up, everyone goes crazy on when it’s the right time to buy, rather than when it’s lower, to go in and heavily invest and see how it grows. That’s really what we do. We are very, very committed to games and keep on hiring. So if the game developers out there reads that, please look at all the ads we have everywhere. We’re looking for a lot of talent to grow internally.

This interview has been edited and condensed.