Amazon Games To Publish Next Tomb Raider, First Details Revealed

Not complaining but... why? I mean, why Amazon Games? Crystal Dynamics is now part of the Embracer Group, they have THQ Nordic... why are they not the ones publishing this? Why are they giving Amazon a cut when they can keep it in-house?

That said, if Amazon wants to get into gaming arena for real, being a publisher that publishes other people's games is their best bet to grow in the field, instead of throwing lots of money at internal projects and buying developers.

If u want dlc u have to be a prime member lol

@Tharsman Does seem strange unless Amazon are perhaps making a TV series for Prime.

@Cyberpsycho that would still not explain it, IMO. They making a TV series for God of War and they are not publishing that.

What is crossing my mind is the possibility that Amazon is getting ready to buy Embracer Group.

@Tharsman Maybe its just the money factor. Amazon would finance part or all the game and they got publishing rights in exchange or something like that. Amazon financing could make Tomb Raider huge.

@Tharsman they could be partly financing the game.

Oh no, please don't be a timed year luna exclusive.

I too find it strange they are going with Amazon to publish. Glad to see it’s multiplatform, but odd with Amazon.

I like the Tomb Raider franchise and though the reboot was good, it didn’t feel like Tomb Raider to me. Tomb Raider was a single player game where you felt completely alone. Areas to explore, puzzles to solve, and the occasional animal to fight. What I wasn’t fond of in the reboot was wave after wave of human enemies. For the new one they already said “plenty of enemies to defeat” so I personally am not getting my hopes up for this one. No offense to those who loved the reboot, it was a good game and I liked it but I didn’t love it. I was hoping for them to find a balance between old and new. They still might be able to find that balance, but after reading that, I am not getting excited for this. I’ll just have to wait and see.

That's random. Embracer is a publisher. That's like Ubisoft having EA publish assassin's Creed. Can't imagine why, but this is the first I've seen Amazon becoming a publisher.

Well we know it won't be on game pass or plus and probably streams free with prime. Good luck, ftc, Amazon may have accidentally thrown you further under the bus.

Rise of the Tomb Raider: 20 Year Celebration is one of my favourite games from the last generation, especially because of the gameplay, tombs, environments, graphics, sound effects and camera. The other two are not as good but both Rise of the Tomb Raider and Shadow of the Tomb Raider are two of the best-looking games ever. If they can get rid of the awful writing (Rhianna Pratchett), avoid the waves of human enemies and create a consistent Lara Croft and not the one from the latest trilogy, that is a sensitive and moralistic woman and a cold-blooded serial killer at the same time, then Tomb Raider will be what it should be and what it was once.

@Chaudy @eduscxbox Financing the development of a game is part of the way the whole "publishing" business works, so yes they are. But the only reason for them to be needed for that is if THQ Nordic itself is running on fumes.

Won’t lie reading that headline made me throw up in my mouth a little. I despise Amazon.

I will never care who makes a game or who publishes a game. None of that interests me or matters to me in any way. All I care about is if the game looks really good, plays really well and is a single player story driven game like all games should be.

Well dang. First Tomb Raider I'll be skipping I guess.

Might pick it up used way down the line enough that Amazon doesn't see a cent though.

I'm expecting prime members to get a massive discount when preordering it

@Tharsman watch Sony buy embracer In a bigger IP consolation than anything Microsoft is doing. Or worse, Tencent. I've wondered for years just how embracer is handling the massive massive massive debt they're racking up. The founder/CEO has gone bankrupt twice before in other games business.

With Activision going to gp it would make sense for Amazon to buy embracer, and prove MS point that Amazon, not Sony is their competition, but I can't imagine embracer being so far along to sell to Amazon after having just made big purchases, without more protracted and public financial struggle. Embracer would be a far better deal than activation Activision. Abk is worth more but all the value is in 2 IPs.

It does sound like there's more to the deal than the game with the talk of a Lara croft universe spanning, etc. Seems like a merchandising or other product angle around a whole Lara croft brand universe going on besides the video game.

Ugh I hate big media and pop culture. I liked gaming because it's wasn't part of that insipidness.

Quiet, isolated and melancholic exploration of far away places both beautiful and dangerous. If they can capture that, huzzah.

@NEStalgia Gaming has always been part of that "insipidness".

Today's gaming business drama still dont hold a candle to Atari's terrible treatment of their developers and Nintendo's contracts that forbid any developer that makes an NES game making a game for any other console, something that went all the way to the supreme court until it was dimmed anticompetitive behavior, freeing devs to make various games for different platforms, and the unthinkable: multi-platform games!

The only thing that has changed is the same thing that has changed in politics, and all other media: internet has changed the news cycle from something that took a month to reach your eyes, in condensed form, into something that we follow on a daily and hourly basis, with extreme minutia and detailed insight.

@NEStalgia Technically, Embracer group isn’t a publisher… They’re a holding company just like Take-Two. They own companies that publish games, but they themselves don’t publish anything.

But Amazon also published Lost Ark which was their first big break in the game industry, so it seemed they realized that they are better off publishing instead of developing. Due to every game they tried to develop have end up a flop.

Embracer Group has grown exponentially for the last few years. But it may come to bite them back really soon. Most of their recent in house games had been mediocre. I don't care about most of their in house Devs or their games. But they've 4A Games with amazing Metro Series, Warhorse Studio with brilliant Kingdom Come deliverance and Crystal Dynamics and Eidos and also lord of the rings publishing right. They were releasing amazing games before acquisition so I'd like to see them keep up their good works. I have a feeling if Microsoft is successful in Activision merger then they might pick up Crystal Dynamics and Eidos which was a missed opportunity cause of unfortunate timing. And recently Amazon made Rings of Power so who knows what Amazon is also thinking about.

@Tharsman Oh I didn't mean the insipidness if business intrigue. I remember Nintendo as run by Hiroshi "Totally Not a Yakuza, Honest!" Yamauchi, the days of Howard Lincoln using Congress as a blunt instrument against Sega and replaying Night Trap footage every night on the evening news ...

I meant the insipidness of big media , the "entertainment industry", where a game is a component of a multimedia, mixed market metaverse that's melds with the lamentable big media industry, where every game is a product brand rather than a game.

@Floki yeah, they're a holding company not technically the publishing arm. But it's the same thing in a practical sense, they're their own publisher. I mean technically Sony isn't a publisher it's the parent company of SIE which is, but we just refer to it as "Sony" and TT games as publishers.

Considering Amazon's track record in gaming so far I'm not hopeful here. they've been throwing a lot of money at projects with no real results so far. Now they're publishing other companies' franchises instead?

Do we know how far out the project is, @FraserG?

Thank you, @FraserG. I'll turn 60 next year, so just have to hope I can hold out until it releases...

"The biggest and best Tomb Raider game yet"

WOW... Can I have a pint of what you've been drinking...

@Tharsman Yes, but Amazon has much more resources to fund a game than THQ. Even if THQ is doing great, Amazon has just vastly more resources. And that's not only for the money, but all AWS infrastructure that can help Crystal Dynamics.

This will be a bomb them. Amazon Luna is going so well. Like Google, lay off gaming Amazon. You don’t know what you’re doing.