Amazon Forced Devs to Build an AI Game, Then Axed Them

Imagine spending years building a game, being told to tear it apart and rebuild it around generative AI to justify your team's existence, scrambling to meet an 18-month deadline to ship the new version, and then getting laid off before you can finish. That's what happened to the developers at Amazon Game Studios' San Diego office, according to a detailed report from Eurogamer.

The game was called Project Trident, a Viking-inspired third-person action comedy that used generative AI to make NPCs and the game world more responsive. But Project Trident didn't start that way. According to sources who worked on it, the game was originally a more serious Shadow of the Colossus-style adventure. It only pivoted after Amazon pushed a corporate mandate requiring every development division to incorporate AI into its projects. The implicit threat, per the report: comply or face cuts.

So the team complied. They scrapped their original vision and rebuilt Project Trident as a Helldivers-style game. Then they rebuilt it again as a single-player experience. They were given just 18 months to have it ready to ship, managed to negotiate extra time when that deadline proved impossible, and were working on a demo when Amazon pulled the plug as part of the company's October 2025 layoffs, which cut roughly 14,000 employees across the business.

I keep coming back to the cruelty of the sequence here. These developers didn't refuse the mandate. They didn't push back and get fired for insubordination. They did what was asked of them, reworked their entire project multiple times, and were still axed. The mandate wasn't a lifeline; it was a treadmill that kept them busy until the layoffs arrived.

The Wreckage Beyond Trident

Project Trident wasn't the only casualty. New World: Aeternum, one of Amazon Games' few success stories, is set to shut down in January 2027. Steve Boom, head of Amazon Games, Twitch, and audio, wrote in a memo at the time of the layoffs that the company had "made the difficult decision to halt a significant amount of our first-party AAA game development work, specifically around MMOs, within Amazon Game Studios." That language also appeared to seal the fate of Amazon's ambitious Lord of the Rings MMO, which now seems to have been canceled alongside Project Trident.

Amazon hasn't abandoned the Lord of the Rings IP entirely. In a statement to Eurogamer, Jeff Grattis, head of Amazon Games, said, "Our creative team continues to explore a new game experience that does justice to Tolkien's world; we are working closely with Middle-earth and remain excited about the IP." That's the kind of corporate language that could mean anything from "we have a full team on this" to "someone in a meeting mentioned it last quarter."

What makes the Project Trident story sting isn't just the layoffs. Studios get shut down; projects get canceled. That's grim but not unusual. The part that sets this apart is the mandate. Amazon didn't just fail to protect its developers from layoffs. It actively forced them to destroy their own work, rebuild it around a technology the company wanted to promote, and then discarded them when the experiment didn't produce results fast enough. The developers, by all accounts, tried to make it work. They shifted genres, they shifted scope, they adapted to absurd timelines. None of it mattered.

This is what happens when AI adoption becomes a corporate performance metric rather than a creative tool. The decision to use generative AI in Project Trident didn't come from the developers identifying a design problem that AI could solve. It came from the top, as a blanket requirement, applied to every division regardless of whether it made sense for their project. And when the results didn't materialize on schedule, the people who were forced to execute someone else's vision were the ones who paid for it. Amazon Games still has active projects, including whatever the Lord of the Rings game becomes, but the San Diego team that bent over backwards to meet an impossible mandate is gone.