Christoph Hartmann, Amazon’s vice president of games studios, has seen a lot of false starts and stumbles with Amazon Games’ previous projects, but with New World’s overall success, he’s feeling a bit more confident while also eager to push forward. That’s the overall vibe from a recent interview on NME, where he talks about Amazon’s progress to this point and what it plans to do next.
According to Hartmann, the company’s decision to pause release and polish New World is the biggest takeaway from previous failures like Crucible, and according to him, it’s been paying off.
“So far, we haven’t had a lot of complaints about the game. You can see our Steam reviews. They were very good in the beginning, then they went down because of the queue time. Now they went up to being good again because it’s more or less resolved, so I guess people are still having fun.”
Of course, this quote and the overall discussion does ignore the kaleidoscopic elephant in the room of the game’s current woes, but it does note that Amazon is in it for the long haul, with plans to support New World’s development via additional cosmetics and one-off expansion pack purchases that promise game-changing content drops.
The interview further elaborates on Amazon’s greater ambitions for gaming releases, with a nod to its three studios in Irvine, San Diego, and Montreal, publishing aspirations, and Project Ignite, which plans to find “very young or new developers who are very creative – who want to be disruptive – think outside of the box” and put Amazon’s prodigious fiscal backing behind them.
That said, making fewer games but making them the best they possibly can appears to be the overall strategy. “I believe doing fewer is better, and making sure each game is fully focused, and only shipping a game when it’s ready,” says Hartmann. “That is something I really learned and observed from Sam Houser at Rockstar, where I also worked, and he ran all the developments. His mindset was: ‘I’d rather there be fewer games that are really big, and only ship them when they’re ready.’”
