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The new Lord of the Rings MMO coming from Amazon Games is not aimed exclusively at fans of the MMO genre. Amazon Games president Christoph Hartmann said in a new interview with IGN that he wants people who might say they don’t care about MMOs to give this one a shot. Basically, Hartmann believes the game can appeal to “everyone.”
“The game by itself needs to be so good that everyone wants to play it… My target is not just to make a certain group of MMO players happy with the game, I want people who normally would not play an MMO saying, ‘Hey, maybe give it a try because I understand the content, it’s Lord of the Rings, I’ve never played an MMO,'” Hartmann said.
“I definitely think we got to approach this from a much wider perspective than just being another MMO title. I want to make it very mass market competitive,” he added.
Amazon’s untitled Lord of the Rings MMO is coming from the company’s Orange County studio, the team that helped support the development of another MMO, New World. That game put up massive numbers at launch and then the playerbase dropped off.
Hartmann said the team learned from that process that a team needs to think beyond launch and “literally prepare for the two years after.” Hartmann said the developers of New World “weren’t prepared” for the game’s quick success out of the gate. Only time will tell if Amazon can retain players better with the upcoming Lord of the Rings game.
Amazon Games already tried to make a Lord of the Rings MMO years ago as a co-development project with Leyou. That game fell apart, and now Amazon is trying again, but this time it’s developing the game internally.
It’s still very early days for Amazon’s new Lord of the Rings MMO, but we do know that the game is in development for PC and console. It’s based on the Middle-earth literary works, not the Oscar-winning films. It’s also not connected to Amazon’s Rings of Power series.
