September 30, 2016 was a big day for Amazon Game Studios: It was on that day, at TwitchCon, it unveiled Breakaway, Crucible, and New World, signalling a major push into the realm of big-budget game development. Not quite a decade later, we find ourselves standing amidst the rubble of that once-great ambition, with a single question on our minds: What the hell went wrong?
Because things very definitely did go wrong. First, Amazon halted development of Breakaway in 2018 after some iffy previews and an open alpha that failed to impress. It followed that up by not halting development of Crucible, even though it probably should have given that Crucible ended up being 'un-released' just a month after it went live and was ultimately canned outright.
