Amazon will publish the next Tomb Raider video game: Amazon announced on Thursday that it will publish the next game in the popular “Tomb Raider” series. This is a big win for the tech giant’s video game business. The action-adventure game Tomb Raider was made by a company in California called Crystal Dynamics. Its main character, Lara Croft, is a British archaeologist who travels the world’s unexplored tombs, solving puzzles and fighting bad guys as she goes.
Square Enix, a Japanese company, put out recent versions of the game, like the well-known “Shadow of the Tomb Raider” from 2018. Several movies have been made based on the series.
Crystal Dynamics is still making the game, which doesn’t have a release date yet and is still in the early stages of development. But Amazon will be the publisher, which means that the company works closely with Crystal Dynamics on “creative support” and is in charge of things like marketing, shipping the game to different retail and online platforms, and advertising.
Amazon will publish the next Tomb Raider video game
The new “Tomb Raider” game will be Amazon Games’s first major single-player game. The company struggled for years to break into the difficult, closed-off world of game development, but finally found its niche with multiplayer online games. Adding a single-player “flagship” game to its lineup could be a big step for Amazon and help boost its reputation in the industry.
Christoph Hartmann, the vice president of Amazon Games, said in an interview, “It’s a big deal for us.” “Four years ago, if someone had told you that Amazon makes games, you would have laughed.”
Under longtime Amazon executive Mike Frazzini, who left the company this year, Amazon’s video game business, which has been around for ten years, struggled. In 2018, the company hired Hartmann, who had been in the business for a long time and had started 2K Games, which makes popular games like NBA 2K. Hartmann would report to Frazzini.
Google, which had also tried its hand at video games, shut down the part of its gaming service, Stadia, that made its own games in 2021. This year, it announced that it would end the service as a whole. Some people thought the same thing could happen to Amazon and its plans for video games.
But Amazon finally came out with a popular multiplayer game, “New World,” last fall. This spring, they followed it up with “Lost Ark,” another well-liked game.
This could help “Tomb Raider” do even better. Even though Amazon is late to the video game business and is behind companies like Microsoft that have a lot of money, Hartmann says he thinks time is on his side because he is just one part of a larger company that is patient and doesn’t expect to make money right away.
He said, “I’m not in that rat race to see who can do better than the other. I’m here to make great games.”
After a trilogy of games about Lara Croft’s past, the new “Tomb Raider” game will go “back to our roots,” said Scot Amos, the studio head at Crystal Dynamics, though he said it was too early to give many details.
“There’s a natural progression to what we can do next there in terms of giving her a bigger adventure, more things to do, and more worlds and mysteries to explore,” he said.
Getting people with experience in video games has paid off for Amazon. He said that Amos’ studio had some doubts at first about working with Amazon because it is still fairly new to the gaming world, but they were won over.
“When we started this talk, we didn’t know what Amazon’s group was like,” Amos said. “We knew they had a few games out, but when we talked to Christoph, he said, ‘Oh, by the way, we’ve all been in this business for about 25 or 30 years.'”
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