Amazon’s gaming division announced the opening of its first European studio. It is located in Bucharest.

Bloomberg sources claim that the Twitch streaming service is waiting for mass layoffs. According to their information, Amazon, which owns it, is preparing to cut more than a third of Twitch’s employees — about 500 people.

The year 2023 was remembered by the gaming industry for massive cuts. The wave of layoffs affected both indie studios and corporations: Embracer Group, CD PROJEKT, Ubisoft, Telltale Games, Blackbird Interactive, Ascendant Studios and many other video game-related companies announced layoffs. According to the portal videogamelayoffs.com Since January, 10,466 specialists have lost their jobs.

Amazon Games vice President Christoph Hartmann said in a letter to employees that massive layoffs took place in the Amazon gaming division. The thing is that the company has adjusted its approach to doing business.

Journalist Zach Bussey (Zach Bussey) in his profile on X (Twitter) reported that Amazon fired some of the Twitch employees.

Amazon has decided to discontinue the Amazon Appstore in China. It will close on July 17, the newspaper The Paper reports with reference to the company’s letter.

More than 100 employees of Amazon‘s gaming division have been cut. This happened two weeks after Amazon announced the layoff of 9 thousand people across the company.

John Smedley will no longer head Amazon Game Studios San Diego. He decided to leave the company and try his hand at something new.

Christoph Hartmann voiced his opinion in an interview with Gamespot. He believes that in the future, only a few independent companies may remain in the industry, which will own the rest.

CNBC journalists, citing their own sources, report that the deal between the companies will not take place after all. Officially, neither Amazon nor Electronic Arts (EA) have yet commented on the news.

Another big gaming deal is coming up. The media write that today Amazon will announce the purchase of Electronic Arts (EA).

US Senator Elizabeth Warren and her colleague Mondar Jones have introduced a bill to ban anti-competitive mergers. If it is accepted, companies will not be able to make transactions more expensive than $5 billion.

On Wednesday, Twitch was subjected to a hacker attack: among the stolen data was information about an application codenamed Vapour. It has already been dubbed a Steam rival.

The new CEO of Amazon, Andy Jassy, in light of the success of New World on Steam, said that video games could become the largest entertainment category for the company.

Last Tuesday, Amazon announced a partnership with the British independent game studio Glowmade. The developers are planning an online cooperative game, but there are no details yet.

Closed beta testing of New World, a premium MMORPG developed by Amazon Games, began yesterday. Already in the first day of online games on Steam exceeded 190 thousand people. Now she is also in the top on Twitch.

In 2018, software engineer James Liu was invited to work at Amazon. That’s just that he didn’t like some of the points of the company’s employment contract, which concerned the creation of personal games outside of work. Liu recently shared a fragment of the document on Twitter, and his post immediately went viral.

Amazon decided to significantly upgrade its Lumberyard technology and turned it into an open source engine. It is called Open 3D Engine and is suitable for creating cross-platform AAA games. The developers note that there will be dozens of different tools in the new modular engine.Lumberyard was originally based on the CryEngine engine, which Amazon licensed from Crytek in 2015.

Another company, following Apple and Google, reduces the commission for developers with a small income. Amazon has announced that from the fourth quarter of 2021, the commission in its Appstore will be reduced to 20%. Developers will also be able to receive 10% cashback.