Amazon is investing $500 million a year on it’s video game division- and is failing hard. What can we learn from their mistakes?
Amazon has cancelled its Lord of the Rings game, becoming the fifth cancelled title from Amazon Games. This comes as just one in a string of failures to break into the gaming industry.
Amazon is investing $500 million a year on this project, and with gamers spending close to $160 billion in 2020, Amazon is thirsty as hell for success in this – but it seems that video games are its achilles heel.
Why?
Because they can’t be made “the Amazon way.”
They hired Mike Frazznini, an Amazon aficionado who had never made a video game in his life, to be in charge of the games division. He promoted the company philosophy without acknowledging how different this kind of endeavor would be.
The company is driven by data; research must be done, and there are no steps forward without evidence that success is possible. This is great when mass producing products and creating effective systems, but not to create a game.
Game creation is a process of art, fun, design, and detail. Creators are not used to “proving” their methods with spreadsheets. The company philosophy is the glitch here; not the games.
Bottom line, Amazon is a company. Companies start off with certain values and principles, and as they evolve it’s important to not be so strongly wed to those that you miss opportunities to think outside the box.
So what can your business learn from this much bigger business’s failure?
- Stay flexible – Never be so rigid in your ways that you can’t adapt and change.
- Hire an expert – If it’s a little outside your lane, don’t assume you can do it. Get professional help.
- Keep going – If Amazon can dust off their pants and try again, so can you. Mistakes happen, and each one is an opportunity to learn and eventually profit from.
