Christoph Hartmann exits Amazon games after eight years

MUMBAI: It seems Amazon’s gaming division has finally met its final boss. After nearly eight years at the helm, Christoph Hartmann is reportedly packing up his controller and heading for the exit. The news, first reported by Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, marks the end of an era for the man who steered the New World and Lost Ark ships into the choppy waters of the MMO market.

While Hartmann’s departure might look like a simple game over, it is actually part of a massive tactical pivot. Amazon appears to be retreating from the costly, high-stakes world of traditional AAA console and PC development. Instead of chasing the next blockbuster epic, the company is looking skyward by focusing its energy on Amazon Luna, its dedicated cloud gaming service.

This leadership shuffle coincides with a broader wave of 16,000 redundancies across the Amazon empire. For gamers, the most poignant bit of lag is the news that New World: Aeternum is set to go offline permanently in January 2027. It appears the company is no longer interested in building digital worlds from scratch, but rather in providing the cloud-based pipes to stream them.

Hartmann leaves behind a legacy of taking Amazon from a struggling studio to a genuine, if brief, contender in the PC gaming space. Looking forward, the hardware focus is shifting entirely to Luna infrastructure. Rumours suggest the new-look Amazon Games will be heavily bolstered by AI-integrated experiences rather than traditional software. Whether this move is a masterstroke or a massive misclick remains to be seen. For now, the Amazon Games office is looking a little bit emptier, and the cloud is looking a lot more crowded.