Dozens of staff have been laid off by Amazon Game Studios, the company has confirmed.

A source speaking to Kotaku said staff were given notice late last week of the redundancies, after which they were given 60 days to find a new job.

The source, who was one of the people hit by the layoffs, also claimed that Amazon had cancelled some games.

Amazon Game Studios continues to work on previously announced titles New World and Crucible, as well as other unannounced projects.

Games investment continues

“Amazon Game Studios is reorganising some of our teams to allow us to prioritise development of New World, Crucible, and new unannounced projects we’re excited to reveal in the future,” said an Amazon spokesperson.

“These moves are the result of regular business planning cycles where we align resources to match evolving, long-range priorities. We’re working closely with all employees affected by these changes to assist them in finding new roles within Amazon. Amazon is deeply committed to games and continues to invest heavily in Amazon Game Studios, Twitch, Twitch Prime, AWS, our retail businesses, and other areas within Amazon.”

Amazon has made a number of moves in the games space over the years, but has yet to tie them all together effectively for its own development plans.

The company launched its own game engine called Amazon Lumberyard in 2015, a result of a large licensing deal with CryEngine. The tech hasn’t proved as popular as rivals Unity and Unreal Engine however.

Amazon Game Studios itself has struggled to release new titles. While work continues on Crucible and New World, it cancelled another of its games, Breakaway, last year.

It has only released one game since 2015 - The Grand Tour Game for PS4 and Xbox One.

Amazon still has other more successful parts of its business linked to games, including games streaming platform Twitch and Amazon Web Services.