Amazon’s struggles to find a video game hit claims another victim

Amazon’s newest try to achieve a foothold in video games, 2025’s multiplayer co-op recreation present King of Meat, has failed. Developer Glowmade and writer Amazon Sport Studios confirmed Monday that King of Meat will shut down in April, and that gamers who bought the sport will obtain full refunds.

“Regardless of the creativity and innovation Glowmade dropped at King of Meat, the sport has sadly not discovered the viewers we hoped for,” Amazon Sport Studios mentioned in an announcement on the King of Meat web site. “Consequently, we have now made the tough determination to conclude our funding within the recreation, and King of Meat’s servers will shut on April 9, 2026. Gamers will be capable of entry and play all current content material till then, so we encourage you to get pleasure from your remaining time within the recreation together with your fellow Contenders.”

King of Meat’s closure probably will not come as a shock to gamers, or anybody who’s paid consideration to Amazon’s recreation output over the previous decade. Whereas the sport obtained largely optimistic evaluations on Steam — critics have been extra harsh, primarily based on mixture evaluate information from OpenCritic — King of Meat peaked at 320 concurrent gamers there. Primarily based on our hands-on expertise with the sport at launch, console gamers did not present up both.

“I dove in on PlayStation 5 throughout its maiden weekend and was very hardly ever in a position to matchmake with sufficient gamers to get a full four-player workforce going,” Polygon’s Giovanni Colantonio wrote in our early impressions of King of Meat. “I got here again on launch day correct and had a fair more durable time discovering even one teammate. Issues don’t appear too promising on Steam both, the place the sport at the moment has 58 evaluations on the time of writing, pulled from the sport’s 5 days of early entry.”

King of Meat is the newest casualty at Amazon, which final month confirmed that its once-hot MMO New World: Aeternum would shut down for good in 2027. Earlier than that, Amazon Sport Studios tried and failed with video games like MOBA-inspired shooter Crucible (which unlaunched weeks after its launch) and sports-fantasy brawler Breakaway (which lasted a bit longer). Amazon additionally canceled an in-development Lord of the Rings MMO, and has largely discovered success in publishing different corporations’ MMOs, like Smilegate’s Misplaced Ark and NCSoft’s Throne and Liberty. Amazon nonetheless has a unique Lord of the Rings MMORPG within the works, in addition to different untitled tasks and a pair of Tomb Raider video games.

Glowmade and Amazon unveiled King of Meat in 2024 at Gamescom Opening Evening Stay and launched it the next 12 months on PlayStation 5, Home windows PC, and Xbox Sequence X.