At the helm of Amazon Games is Christoph Hartmann, a German manager who has big plans. He wants to make the new MMORPG about Lord of the Rings the “biggest MMO” and that should be done by the team that has already gone through so much with “New World” (Steam). But Hartmann sees this as an advantage.
Who’s speaking? Christoph Hartmann was born in Rosenheim. His parents worked as dentists, but he didn’t feel like staring into the mouths of peasants for 40 years, he said (via gamespot). He’s someone who names his dog “Sissi,” after the film series.
As a teenager, he fell in love with American culture, partly because an American coached him in basketball. And so, when he was 18, he did an exchange year in Malone, New York.
Hartmann worked as a DJ while studying economics in Munich and thus landed an internship for a music label in Spain. Eventually he ended up in gaming and in 1997 he was part of the team that created the original Grand Theft Auto.
From 1995, Hartmann worked for the game publisher Take-Two (GTA, Max Payne) for more than 20 years and founded the gaming label “2K Games” (Bioshock, Borderlands, Civilization) in 2005. He left the studio in 2017 without further explanation of reasons.
Since 2018 he has been the most important man at Amazon Games as “Vice President” and is now planning a large-scale attack on MMORPGs.
In an interview with IGN, he explains his intentions for the new Lord of the Rings MMORPG, which Amazon officially announced on May 15th. The New World team is to develop the mammoth project.
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Dahe says to Lord of the Rings:
I want it to be the biggest MMO out there. It’s good for us of course, but it’s also good for gamers because I think there’s a market for people who want big MMOs. There aren’t many out there and I want it to be a title that brings a lot of people to the genre because ultimately the more people play, the more people there are to play with. And that’s my dream and my hope: it’s going to be the biggest MMO out there.
“It’s gotten better since I’ve been here”
What does he say about the problems at Amazon Games? Amazon had a difficult start in gaming: With Breakaway and Crucible, the first projects died quickly.
According to Hartmann, video game publishers are like a roller coaster. And right now you are “rather on the way up than on the way down”:
Amazon was trying to get into games and I think they approached it more like a tech company than a gaming or entertainment company.
When they first brought me in with a lot of experience and knowledge of the gaming industry and as they gave us the breathing room we needed it got better.
“New World was a big, big hit”
What about the difficulties in New World? New World had a fantastic start on Steam in 2021, with almost 1 million players online, but players quickly disappeared due to a lack of new content and gameplay difficulties.
Nevertheless, Hartmann sees the MMORPG as a great achievement.
He says that being able to pull off something this big with a first throw and their own tech is great for a new team. Otherwise it just doesn’t happen.
However, the New World team was then so surprised by the launch rush:
Not only can you prepare for launch, you have to prepare for the first 2 years after launch.
Looking back, that was the big lesson from New World. In retrospect, he says: If you had made more content and fewer problems, you might have kept more players. But people would still like New World. A Battle Pass would have been released now, the numbers rose again.
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For the future, he intends that Amazon Games will also develop for the consoles. The fact that the first games only came for the PC was obviously a decision made before his time.
He sees “live service” games, including MMOs, as a market with great potential that continues to grow. Players retiring due to age would be replaced by younger ones. So the market can continue to grow.
Hartmann says that to reach millions of players, you have to take big risks and reach out to players who have never played an MMO before. He is willing to take these risks:
It’s not my goal to make a certain group of MMO players happy with the game. I want people who don’t normally play MMORPGs to say: Hey, maybe I’ll play this because I understand it. It’s Lord of the Rings […] – I want us to approach it with such a broad perspective that we’re not just doing another MMO.
More about the new Lord of the Rings MMO:
Amazon is developing a new MMORPG for Lord of the Rings – promises open world for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X with top quality