What Has Amazon Done For You Lately?

How about a catch-up on what's happening with Amazon Prime Gaming? Anyone up for that? And while we're about it, how about a general What's Up With Amazon? Because it's hard to be sure, sometimes, isn't it? For one of the biggest consumer-goods companies in the world, they really don't make it easy for the customer, do they?

I'm not really down with the whole Death of the Interwebs narrative but it's hard to argue that certain once-reliable strands aren't getting horribly tangled now. Amazon used to be relatively clean and straightforward to navigate but it's been a while since it felt like that was still true.

You really can't trust the reviews the way you once could, what with the bots and the review farms and now AI. I like the way they've tried to set a bot to catch a bot but those AI summaries are only theoretically helpful. As far as I can see they just summarize, accurately enough, the reviews you probably couldn't trust in the first place. 

I still have to read a whole bunch of reviews and use my training as an Eng. Lit. grad and longtime writer to try and parse the truth from the hype. Rufus, the weirdly-named Amazon House AI, seems to take them all on face value. 

Why is it called Rufus, anyway? I mean, I know everything has to be called something but not very many things have to be called Rufus. Or any. Why pick on that?

Oh, hey, guess what? There's a reason. Because of course there is. Would you like to know what it is? Of course you would. Shall we ask Gemini to tell us? Why not? 

All these AIs know each other, you do know that, right? They lounge around in their luxuriously appointed virtual chat-room, blipping to each other at the speed of information and this is just the kind of thing they talk about:

AI Overview

Amazon's AI assistant, Rufus, is named after the company's first office dog, a beloved Welsh corgi from its early days in the 1990s, honoring the company's dog-friendly culture and the furry friend who was a fixture in the offices and even appeared on early error pages. 

• Origin Story: Rufus was a loyal Welsh Corgi, owned by an early Amazon employee, who roamed the first warehouse, played fetch, and was a significant part of the startup's early family.
• Legacy: The original Rufus passed away in 2009, but his legacy lives on, with Amazon even naming a building after him and continuing its pet-friendly policy.
• Connection to AI: Naming the new generative AI shopping assistant after him pays homage to this nostalgic figure, blending Amazon's history with its future technology to create a relatable brand for customers. 

Does that humanize Rufus for you? Or caninize it? Maybe that should that be him? What's the correct gender appellation for an AI? 

Also, did you know Amazon has a "pet-friendly" policy?  Does that humanize the company for you? 

So many questions.  

 

Corgis, too. What about them? They've had a makeover, haven't they? I guess now the Queen's not around any more that whole image I grew up with is gone for good. Apparently everywhere else in the world Corgis are cute, goofy doggies, not hateful symbols of class privelige. How times change.

 

Anyway, I like them now. Corgis, that is, not the royal family. I have no strong opinions on the royals. Never have had. Which is surprising. There aren't many things I don't have strong opinions on.

 

I like nearly all kinds and styles of dog, anyway. Dachshunds I have issues with. Hard to spell for one thing. Also often unnecessarily aggressive, as are Chihuahuas. Does canine aggression come in direct proportion to how hard it is to spell the name of the breed correctly? I had to use Spell Check to get both of those right and I'm a good speler. (Yay! Visual joke!)

 

Hmm. Even for me, this is a a bit of a wander. I'll attempt to recalibrate. What was I going to talk about? Oh, yes, Prime Gaming.

 

Before we do, though, you really ought to see the HTML that came across when I cut and pasted that Gemini quote. I just went in to tweak something (Normally I write in Compose View not HTML.) and Blimey, Charlie! Here, take a look:

 

What is that? All that red! 

 

Anyway, so, the Amazon storefront isn't as reliable or user-friendly as it used to be, even with the digital ghost of a dead dog doing its best to help. (Did I ever mention my character that I played for a couple of  Golden Heroes campaigns back in the 80s was a robotic dog called The Ghost Dog? I did? Oh, okay then...)

 

And Prime Video? Sheesh! Hasn't that ever gone downhill!? It's kind of insulting that they not only added compulsory, unskippable adverts to a service they're already charging a subscription for but then to stick a "Go Ad-Free" button on the ads themselves! Is that not what the police in TV shows used to call Running A Protection Racket?

 

Also, the placement of the ads. Who's picking the spots? Is it completely random? Why is there sometimes just one at the beginning and one near the end and other times three in ten minutes in the middle? And has no-one at Amazon ever heard of the concept of a "natural break"? Just slam the damn things in anywhere, why don't you?

 

Do you know what I do? I mute the sound and tab out as soon as the ads start. It handily tells you how long they're going to last but I don't bother timing it. If you leave it longer than that, when you come back you can just roll the video back to just before you left and it will play normally from then on, without the annoying ad. It's disruptive, sure, but not as much as watching the bloody things would be. Also, you feel like you're getting one over on The Man.

 

(Hey, speaking of getting one over on the man, did anyone know there was a Furry Freak Brothers animated show? I didn't until last week. It came up on my Netflix recommends. I watched the pilot episode and it was about as funny as the comics which is to say not all that funny. I haven't watched another. I read all the Freak Bros. comics when I worked in a comic shop in the '80s. Wouldn't have bought them. I also met one of the artists at a con once. Gilbert Shelton, I think it was. Can't remember much about it. There was a lot of drinking involved although no dope, surprisingly.)

 

Gaaaaahh! Dragging this thing back....

 

Oh, wait, just before I get to Prime Gaming, I spotted something actually useful on Prime Video last night. I think this is new. At least it was new to me. 

 

They've slightly changed the UI on the Storefront. I've long been in the habit of using my general Amazon bookmark when I want to watch something on Prime Video, then clicking on Prime Video along the top to open it. I couldn't see the button (It's there now but I swear it wasn't last night...) so I was stumped for all of three seconds. 

 

Then I thought why not try the full menu? Top left corner is an "ALL" button so I pressed that and got a full list of services with Prime Video near the top. Clicking that gets you a flip-out menu and on that one there's another button for My Stuff. 

 

Well. 

 

I wonder? 

 

I wonder if Firefox would make a Bookmark for that? 

 

Yes it would!

 

So now I have a bookmark for Prime Video that takes me straight to a clear, clean page that only has My Stuff on it! Better yet, it has all My Stuff broken out into handy subsections - My Movie Watchlist, My TV Watchlist, things I've bought, my subscriptions...

 

It's a million times better than trying to find My Stuff in the bullet hell of Prime Video's Home Page, where 90% is stuff they want you to pay (Again.) for and almost none of it is anything I'd watch even for free. Has everyone else been doing it this way all along and I was the only sucker doing it the dumb way? Or is this actually a new option? 

 

Either way, if you don't already sort yours this way, I suggest you start. I'm wondering now if there's a Firefox Add-On that will make My Stuff into my Amazon Prime landing page. I have one like that for YouTube and its transformative. Although, if I have a Bookmark for it, I guess don't really need an Add-On.

 

I think that's about it for Amazon-related moans and groans... oh, no, wait! no, it's not! 

 

I'm trying to buy an Amazon eGift Card for my step-daughter in Australia. How hard could that be? I mean, it's a global company and digital products can be delivered instantly by email anywhere in the world. Gotta take five minutes, tops, right? 

 

Hah. Dream, as they used to say, on. You can't buy eCards for any Amazon sub-unit other than the one you have an account with, so if you're in the UK you can only buy eCards for the UK. If you want an Australian one you have to make an account with Amazon.com.au. 

 

Or, in fact, as I discovered, just sign into that website using your existing account details. That works. Still doesn't let you buy a digital card, though. For that, you have to change your location to an address with an Australian postcode. All this for something that isn't going to be damn well posted anywhere!

 

Maybe there are currency or legal reasons? Yeah, maybe, but if so, how come I can buy digital gift cards from other Australian companies using my own address? And have them sent to me, whereupon I just forward them to my step-daughter's email because ALL ANYONE NEEDS IS THE GODDAM CARD NUMBER!

 

I'd say it's almost as if Amazon don't want to take the money but we all know that can't be true.

 

Okay, I'm done. Now about that Prime Gaming offer... 

 

<Sorry! I'm afraid we're out of time for today! Please come back tomorrow.> 

New World Aeternum? More Like New World Temporalis

Twenty-four hours ago, I wouldn't have bet a red cent on my next post here being about New World.

It's true I had been thinking about playing again. The latest update, Nighthaven, looks very appealing and  the previous expansion, Rise of the Angry Earth, which I never bought, just went free to play, so there's a great deal of content I've never seen. The game was reportedly undergoing a bit of a renaissance thanks to all of that and it's always interesting to see an MMORPG in the throes of a surge.

Still, it didn't feel like quite the right time to go back, not for me anyway. I'd uninstalled New World a few months ago because I was running short of storage and space hasn't gotten any bigger since then. I was loathe to give up another 60GB for a game I might not even play. 

And then my PC broke and I moved back to this much older one I'm using now, on which New World probably wouldn't run very well, if it even ran at all. So I pushed the idea to the back of the list, thinking maybe I'd take a look when I got a new machine. 

It's not like there was any hurry, after all. New World wasn't going anywhere. It was on the up, wasn't it? If Amazon hadn't canned it when it was barely scraping by, they'd hardly bail on it when it was picking up traction, would they?

So it was a bit of a surprise, to say the least, when this popped up in Feedly yesterday. Shortly followed by this. 

For anyone that can't be bothered to click through, the first of those links says that Amazon is getting out of the first-party gaming business in general, specifically withdrawing from MMOs. The second confirms that Nighthaven will be the final content release for New World, which will henceforth immediately enter maintenance mode.

It hasn't been officially confirmed yet but you can almost certainly also say goodbye to the in-development MMO based on the Lord of the Rings IP that Amazon was making. Not the first game that was being made in China. That got cancelled a while ago. The second iteration, the one they were supposedly developing in the USA. Since the studios that were working on it don't exist any longer, it's a safe bet that game is gone, too.

Just for clarity, Amazon hasn't (Yet.) pulled out of the games market completely. It's still committed to running Lost Ark and Throne and Liberty in the West, although if I had to guess I'd say that might only last as long as it takes for whatever contractual obligations they might be under to expire. I suspect the company no longer wants anything to do with making and running games at all.

I'm surprised only because I wan't expecting it right now but I can't say I'm surprised it's happening at all.  Amazon was never convincing as a games developer.

The company, like a lot of others that have subsequently pulled away, got into the games market a time when everyone wanted to be in that space. There was a huge boom in gaming during the pandemic and it looked like gaming was potentially going to be the biggest entertainment medium of the next decade if not the rest of the century.

Then several things happened. Interest in gaming generally slipped as people got out of the house and back to the lives they used to have before they got locked down. It also became apparent that what the mainstream audience really wanted were easier, simpler, less challenging games. Meanwhile, Amazon completed development on several games and they were all either disasters or disappointments, New World included. Then finally AI came along and stole everyone's lunch money.

Looked at from a non-gaming perspective, the  question isn't so much "Why would they quit now, when things seem to be looking up?" as "What the hell did they think they were doing messing around with games in the first place and why didn't they get out years ago? It was always obvious they weren't getting anywhere."

It's hard to imagine that all of Amazon's gaming portfolio put together, including not just their first and third party MMOs but also Prime Gaming and Luna, contribute anything very significant to the vast megacorps' bottom line. I asked Gemini to figure out "what percentage of Amazon's overall turnover comes from their gaming operations, including Luna?" and this is what it told me:

"Based on Amazon's 2024 financial reports and available industry data, the revenue from its gaming operations—including Luna, Prime Gaming, and Amazon Games—is significantly less than 1% of the company's overall turnover

. Amazon's gaming sector is relatively small and unprofitable compared to its other business segments, particularly Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its North American e-commerce operations. 

Amazon's total turnover and gaming revenue (2024)

• Total Revenue: For fiscal year 2024, Amazon reported a total revenue of $638 billion.
• Gaming Revenue: In contrast, the company's video game division generated an estimated annual revenue of $549.9 million in 2024. Luna is included within this revenue stream but does not report its figures separately. 

Calculation

Using the figures from 2024, Amazon's gaming revenue accounts for approximately 0.09% of its total turnover."

I'm not vouching for Gemini's accuracy but that's very much in line with what I would have expected so I'll take it.

Of course, none of this has anything at all to do with whether the games are any good. The only conceivable way that would factor in to any decision would be if they were prestige projects that added luster to the company, either with the public or within the corporate ecosphere.

 Like Hollywood movies that no-one goes to see but which win big at the Oscars, every media and entertainment business can afford to carry a few critical darlings for the buzz they offer and for the self-aggrandizement that comes from being associated with them. New World does not add to Amazon's luster. It did, briefly, when it broke sales records on launch but very quickly all the stories in the media were about the gaffes AGS was making and the cascading numbers, which showed players leaving by the hundreds of thousands. 

New World very quickly developed a reputation as a buggy mess of a game, played by almost no-one and operated by barely competent developers, amateurs who seemed to create two new bugs for every old one they fixed. Far from being a feather in Amazon's cap it turned the gaming division into something not far off being a laughing stock.

And yet Amazon stuck with it, trying to shore it up and eventually reshape it into a new game, New World Aeternum, just so it could have a second chance at making a first impression, this time on console. The move was seen by some, even at the time, as a Hail Mary pass for the game but it looked to have landed. After a fashion. 

Player numbers stabilized to an extent. Some of the newer content was relatively warmly received. The whole thing began to look a little less like a clown show. With the recent release of Nighthaven it seemed as if the game might genuinely have a future.

It did not. It does not. It's apparent now that the reason AGS were so surprisingly generous, not only giving away the expansion-sized Nighthaven update for free but throwing in the actual paid expansion Rise of the Angry Earth as a bonus, was that they were done with the whole thing. 

Presumably it all happened quite quickly. I don't imagine anyone said "Hey, we're shutting the studio in a few months and putting the game on life support. How about we go out with a bang?" I imagine until pretty recently the devs working on Nighthaven assumed the intention was to make money on it and if that worked, there'd be further expansions down the line. 

That won't be happening. The game is officially entering maintenance mode. In fact, it already has. There will be no further development and no new content. 

Amazon have undertaken to keep the servers on "through 2026" although I would point out that the exact form of words used in the statement is less definitive than that makes it sound. What they've actually said is that it's their "intention" to do so and we all know what good intentions are worth.

They've also said they'll give "a minimum of six months’ notice" before shutting down the servers so the best we can say for certain right now is that we'll be able to play New World until next April. 

I imagine it'll run on a little longer than that. They probably will let it have another year, provided it doesn't give anyone any trouble. On the same logic that it wasn't making them any meaningful amount of money or giving them any useful publicity, maintenance mode is going to represent an insignificant cost, while closing the servers sooner than they suggested they would could lead to some negative press. Easier just to leave the servers switched on and forget about them until everyone else has, too.

I thought when I started this post that I'd talk about my history with the game, which goes back to the earliest alphas, but this has already run on long enough. I'll leave what I think about the game as a game for then, should I ever get around to writing it. 

For now, I'll just say I've always liked New World. It's been on my permanent list of "games I might go back to some day" for years now.  As I said at the top, I'd been thinking about doing just that recently. The news that it may not be around for much longer and that what's there now is all that there's ever going to be does nothing to change my mind.

Or, actually, no, it makes it quite a lot more likely I will go back and sooner rather than later. I'm going to wait until I replace this PC but once I do, I'll almost certainly re-install New World, including all the content I've never seen, and give it another go. 

Given that I've always played the game as if it was a solo RPG, it makes no difference to me how many other people are playing, too. If maintenance mode leads to ghost servers, it won't much matter for anything I'm likely to be doing. 

As for there being no new content, that's not going to be a problem until I've finished what's already there, which I probably was never likely to do anyway. It's not like I finished everything in the original game, even when I was playing daily for months.

Maintenance mode can be a comfortable, welcoming place, too. The only people around are there because it's a game they really like. There aren't any irritating changes to mechanics or systems to assimilate. You can be assured the experience you expected, and for which you logged in, will be the experience you'll get. For some players, it's a better deal than Live Service.

The problem always is whether it will last. 

It can. Look at Guild Wars. Look at FFXI.  Two games that have been in Maintenance Mode for many years. Both still have players. Both have a good reputation. If Amazon could replicate those experiences for New World players, Maintenance Mode wouldn't be too bad at all.

They won't, of course. They'll run  the game on for just so long as they think they can get away with without a sunset damaging the company, either commercially or reputationally, and then they'll switch the servers off. Amazon isn't Square Enix. It's not even ArenaNet. 

In fact, let's be clear about it: Amazon is not a gaming company at all. It never was. 

You Had One Job...

As I said yesterday, my daily routine these days concludes with a couple of hours of viewing time, all of which happens in bed, on my five year-old, 8" Kindle Fire. Having used the device for half a decade, I'm still in two minds over whether or not I'd recommend it. It very much depends on what you'd want to use it for, which I suppose applies to most things, but seems particularly foregrounded here.

The negatives became apparent fairly early on and have only gotten worse. You're at least theoretically locked into Amazon's ecosystem although one of the first things I did after I set the tablet up was to go online and research how to sideload Google Play. That gets you access to the whole of the wider Android marketplace but it doesn't do you a lot of good when most of the stuff you're interested in comes up as "Not available for your device".

The Kindle Fire is definitely not designed for playing games. It wasn't great at it when I bought it and half a decade later it won't run anything new that I want to try. That's how I ended up installing Bluestacks and re-installing Nox the other day, although as I said at the time, neither of those will run the one game I wanted to play, either. 

They will run pretty much everything else the Kindle Fire won't, though, and there's a third option I meant to mention but forgot, that being Google's own proto-PC-platform, Google Play Games. As the official description puts it 

"Google Play Games on PC brings the best of Google Play by enabling players to experience an immersive and seamless cross-platform gameplay."

The service is still in beta but a couple of weeks back Google rolled it out to 120 countries so it's pretty widely available. At some point I'll probably give it a fair run and post about how I find it but my initial impression is that it's slick and professional as you'd expect but with a limited choice of games as yet. 

It looks as though Google are trying to ensure the games on the service are playable natively using PC controls. There's some of this built into the service itself with key-mapping and games are categorised as either "compatible" or "optimized", depending on how much work the developer has done to port their titles across to PC. 

A quick check of what's available right now yields somewhat disappointing results. Genshin Impact is there, although why you'd need to use the mobile version on PC when there's an actual PC edition is hard to imagine. On the other hand, Honkai Star Rail, is not, so maybe the reverse logic also applies, an argument made neither more nor less convincing by the presence on Google Play Games of HSR's sister title, the oddly-named Honkai Impact 3rd which, although I'd never heard of it until now, is apparently also available on Steam.

Neither Black Desert Mobile nor Dragon Nest (Any version.) are included, unfortunately, and neither is Sky: Children of Light, the game I installed the service hoping to be able to play. For now, there seems to be no real reason to prefer Google Play Games over the established independent alternatives but I have no doubt that will soon change, provided whoever's sponsoring this one at Google doesn't lose interest and wander off.

Returning to the supposed topic, my Kindle Fire, I would also be hesitant to say anything very good about its Amazonian operating system. Derived from Android but heavily modified, FireOS is functional but limited. It chugs along, occasionally halting and requiring a reboot to get it going again. I'd blame that on the age of my Fire but that wouldn't be a convincing excuse; it's always done it.

As for web-browsing, I wouldn't say "forget it" but I would say "bring a book". I tend to use my Kindle within a few feet of the router with a five-bar signal strength rated "Excellent" by the Fire itself and yet it takes what seems like forever to load a new web page. Actually it's seconds but a second is forever in computer time.

Not a real Mondrian.

Worse, the Fire's ability to stream from a website seems inordinately inferior to the speed it can shunt information from one of its own authorised apps like Prime or Netflix. The YouTube app, which I really don't like, works much better than watching the same YouTube videos on Firefox or Chrome, where they sometimes display only as faux-Mondrian blocks of colored squares.

A minor but exceptionally irritating aspect of FireOs is its bull-headed refusal even to consider delivering notifications. As far as I can tell after extensive research it's literally impossible to get a Kindle Fire to cough up the code from a Google Notification, making certain apps entirely inaccessible to me if I'm foolish enough to try and use a Google account to log in. I don't actually approve of the Notification process to begin with but as with many things in life, you'd rather be able to have it and not use it than be denied entirely.

So much for the things the Kindle Fire does badly or not at all. Obviously it would have gone to the back of the cupboard under the stairs long ago if it didn't also have some powerful positives. Really, one positive: the display.

The Fire is designed as a media device by which Amazon really mean a screen on which to watch things you've bought from Amazon. As the name implies, it can act as a Kindle for reading text, a job it performs very well, if not quite as well as an old school Kindle with one of those screens that apes paper. Or so I assume. I've never used one.

Where the Kindle Fire really shines, though, is in video. The display is significantly better than my monitor and far better than my (Admittedly crappy.) television. Even though mine is a five year-old, basic model, the image is intensely crisp and sharp. I'm not sure my eyes are capable of interpreting better.

I didn't ask for a fox.

The thing I found most interesting about watching moving images on a handheld-screen when I first
started was how immersive it could be, even when the image was much smaller than those I was used to. The such first device I ever used was an MP4 player, the make and model of which I can no longer remember. It had a screen about two inches square, so small you'd have imagined it would be all but useless for anything more than reading the liner notes on an album, yet I was able to download TV shows and watch them at work in my lunch break with as much enjoyment as if I was sitting in front of my TV screen at home.

Later, I watched some of the same shows again on a much larger screen and was fascinated by the detail I'd missed but the more surprising discovery was that the lack of that extra visual information didn't seem to have reduced my pleasure or understanding to any meaningful degree. I'm of the opinion the imagination readily fills in the absent detail without the viewer even realising there's anything missing.

Fascinating as that process may be, it's irrelevant to the Kindle Fire. In fact, my experience suggests its rather the reverse. When I move between watching the same shows on my PC monitor and the Kindle Fire, it's the image on the smaller screen that feels more distinct. I prefer it and not just because when I'm watching the Fire I'm usually lying down - although that certainly doesn't hurt.

There's a lot of information available online about the optimal screen size to viewing distance ratio. The Fire display has clearly been optimized for viewing at a comfortable arm's length. If you have average-length arms, I guess. It feels natural, comfortable and immersive. I find it easier to get lost in the image with the Kindle Fire than with just about any other screen I've watched, large or small.

Now I did.

Finally but not at all unimportantly, the sound on the Kindle is really good. I'd prefer it if the speakers faced forward rather than straight up into the ceiling, but they still deliver gratifyingly clear audio at a consistent volume that doesn't vary between applications the way it does on my PC.

The two final positives I have to share about the Kindle Fire are also the two main reasons I bought it in the first place. Kindles are very cheap and very reliable. 

Prior to buying mine, I'd been through something like seven or eight tablets in four or five years. Either I broke them or they broke themselves. Some of them were objectively superior in some respects to the Kindle and most I'd been quite happy with while they lasted but I was fed up of paying good money for devices that barely limped past the manufacturer's minimum guarantee before falling over.

That my Fire, which cost me less than half the price of most of my previous tablets, is still working as well after five years as it did five minutes out of the box is enough to make me feel charitable towards its many flaws. That and the fact it does the one thing I really want it to do pretty much perfectly means there's every chance that, when it finally does expire I'll most likely buy another.

As I implied at the beginning, I wouldn't exactly recommend the thing but then I wouldn't try to dissuade anyone from buying one, either. For me, it has one job to do and it does it well, so I guess it gets a passing grade.

Insert Joke About "One Ring" Here...

This week's big mmorpg news has to be the out-of-the-blue announcement that Amazon's supposedly-abandoned plan to launch a new game based on the Lord of the Rings IP is back on. You could have picked this up anywhere. It was all over the media, from Variety to the Lord of the Rings Online forums, although I think I first spotted it at GamesIndustry.biz, where there was an interview with Amazon Games vice president Christoph Hartmann about it.

Hartmann kind of skates over the reasons why the earlier deal with Tencent fell apart but he has some interesting things to say about the potential clash between the juggernaut he's driving and the horse-drawn haycart that is Standing Stone's LotRO:

"First of all, I have a lot of respect for them to keep it going that long. They have a, not huge, but a very dedicated fanbase. But looking just at the technology, where we're at now, and where we will be in a couple of years, it's just worlds apart. It's a little exaggeration if I say it's going to be like black and white movies to colour, but that's the approach I want to take. It's just a completely different world."

That seems not just fair but, if anything, a polite understatement. Let's assume Amazon's game will take at least three years to launch, although five would probably be more reasonable estimate. In three years, LotRO will be almost twenty years old and to be charitable it was hardly cutting-edge in 2007. As Wilhelm pointed out in a post only yesterday, LotRO is all but unplayable on a 3440×1440 monitor and the official launcher, as I can readily confirm, is one of the worst in the genre.

Aesthetically, LotRO may be a magnificent rendering of Tolkein's vision, holding true to both the spirit and the fact of the lore, but it's also a clunky, awkward video game that's showing its age a good deal more obviously than many of its contemporaries. While I think it's likely that Hartmann will be proved wrong in his belief that "the most likely scenario is… for people just to move over, because the other one is an old game", that's going to have more to do with the stubborn, set-in-their-ways attitude of the current playerbase than the intrinsic merits of the game. Well, that and the inevitable drag factor of sunk cost, fallacious as it may be.

Of course, the preferences of a few thousand LotRO players is most likely going to be neither here nor there. As Hartmann observes, their numbers are "not huge". Then again, are they all that much smaller than those for Amazon's one and only home-grown mmorpg to date, New World? That game sold more than a million copies in a matter of days but now, after all the very well-publicized problems it's had over its first year or so of operation, Steam shows it with an average concurrency of just 15k. 

Of course, when you have fifteen thousand people playing your game at the same time, that probably means at least fifty thousand playing in total. Maybe more, although a multiplier of more than five would seem over-optimistic. Let's say 75k, tops. 

Is that more than LotRO? I'd have thought so but apparently others disagree. MMORPG.gg, posing the question "Is LotRO Worth Playing in 2023?", reckon "The LOTRO population has seen a resurgence over the last year or so and is currently quite healthy with around 100K active players." Other equally unreliable sources talk about daily concurrencies of 30-50k, which sounds, frankly, insane to me.

How they come by any of those figures is anyone's guess but we can at least say for certain that LotRO does still have the potential to attract new or returning players after a decade and a half. As Brightlife reported about a year ago in a YouTube video entitled "LotRO is ALIVE in 2022!", GameSpot recorded the game's highest player count in ten years back in April of last year.

Sounds amazing until you realize that was still only 3,700 peak concurrent players on Steam. Now, given, Steam is very definitely not how most LotRO players access the game - most of them are still using that terrible launcher - but the Steam Charts do at least provide some comparative data. A year later, that average concurrent player count on Steam has fallen back by more than 75% to linger somewhere in the eight-hundreds.

All of which doesn't prove much. It does, however, demonstrate the hardiness of the game Turbine made and that Standing Stone (Or Daybreak, if you prefer the masks-off version.) continue to curate and develop. It's not unlikely that over the course of its lifetime LotRO has seen more players in total than New World or that it currently retains a greater percentage of those players after sixteen years than New World does after a year and a half.

If Amazon's Lord of the Rings MMORPG does put an end to LotRO, I very much doubt it will because of a bleed-over of population. I'd lay odds the huge majority of current players won't move across, just like the huge majority of EverQuest players didn't abandon that game in favor of EverQuest II. Just because two games share the same IP doesn't make them interchangeable.

What would seem to be the  greater threat would be some combination of legal or commercial circumstances outside of the games themselves, limiting or ending Standing Stones' ability to carry on with their version. By some accounts (The ones I believe.) it was something like that which led to the eventual closure of Star Wars Galaxies, when Star Wars: the Old Republic appeared over the event horizon.

I suspect, however, that some kind of "One Country, Two Systems" compromise will be the eventual outcome. Put another way, if Amazon's game is successful, LotRO will be too insignificant to matter and if it's not, no-one will care, anyway. Either way, benign neglect should see the older game through.

From a personal perspective, I'd love to see Amazon's game succeed. The press release makes it sound very appealing: "an open-world MMO adventure in a persistent world set in Middle-earth". I'd play that.

The proposed game will be developed by "Amazon Games Orange County, the studio behind Amazon Games’ open-world MMO game “New World.” That's good. I really like New World. The main reason I don't play any more is because my machine is too old to run it well and I got fed up with the restrictions that come with playing it on GeForce Now.

New World has certainly had its problems but the core game has always been fun to play, the world has always felt convincing and the team behind it has shown dedication, persistence and imagination. It's only reasonable to assume the studio has learned a lot from the experience of building and operating their first, major MMORPG and that that experience will serve them well in developing another.

My main concern is that if it takes five years, as it probably will, I'll be seventy when it arrives. I'm getting to the stage where it doesn't make a lot of sense for me to get too excited about projects that could take years to complete. I mean, imagine if it ended up taking as long as Camelot Unchained or Star Citizen...

On the bright side, if I am in a position to play Amazon's Lord of the Rings when it comes out, at least I should have a PC able to run the game by then. The one I've got isn't going to last another five years, that's for sure.

At my age, you have to take your wins where you can find them.

Nothing From LucasArts This Month? Are You Sure?

Another month, another bunch of freebies from Amazon, another post from me, telling you which I took, which I left and which I'll play. Hah! Just joking on that last one. Like I'll play any of them.

Still, free stuff, easy post... all of that...

So, what's new this month? Well, timeliness, for a start. For the first time in as long as I can remember the new offer actually popped on the first of the month. It was pure chance I spotted it, really. I just happened to be on the app yesterday, looking for something else, I forget what, and there they were; six brand new titles.

Let's go through them. It won't take long.

Doors: Paradox - "A relaxing puzzle escape game! Make your way through a variety of hand-crafted 3D dioramas, look for useful objects, find hidden clues and solve fun puzzles! Unravel this mysterious adventure about chaos, order and the surreal" £12.79 on Steam. Rating: Very Positive.  

Can you say high concept? The screenshots look like they were pulled straight from someone's Etsy page, not from a game. There are fifty-eight of these things, apparently, and all you have to do is "solve the puzzles, open the door, and travel to the next." 

Can't say I'm sold on the idea but the images are pretty enough and the puzzles are supposedly "fit for all players" so I might be able to manage them. I guess it might be worth a look. Claimed.

The Amazing American Circus  - "Roll up and play a deck building game like no other! Gather weird and wonderful performers, amaze audiences, explore Gilded Age America, and transform your run down circus into an entertainment empire. Play your cards right and you could claim the crown of greatest showman from P.T .Barnum!" £15.49 on Steam. Rating: Mostly Positive.

This one looks a bit more interesting. The graphics are moderately appealing, although that fin de siecle illustrative style never did a lot for me. It was a successfully-funded Kickstarter, which could be a positive or a negative. 

I quite like card battlers, which is what this is, according to some of the reviews, but only if they're pretty simple and straightforward, which this seems to be if the people who don't much like it are to be believed. It also has a storyline, which is good, and a heavy focus on resource management, which probably isn't.

Enough there, on balance, to make it worth a look, I think, even though it's highly unlikely I'd ever play it to a finish. Claimed.

Banners of Ruin - "Assemble your party. Answer the call. Win the war. Build a deck and fight a series of turn-based combats with up to 6 party characters through the city of Dawn's Point. Each character can unlock a set of unique cards and abilities that can augment your deck in powerful, exciting ways." £15.49 on Steam. Rating: Very Positive.

Oh, look! It's another card battler! Only this one has anthropomorphic animals! Now I'm interested! Also, the visual style is much more my sort of thing. The spot illos are gorgeous and the muted color palette with the chiaroscuro lighting effects does something for me.

On the downside, this one seems to be the opposite of Amazing American Circus in that most of the complaints revolve around mechanical complexity and unfair difficulty spikes. I suspect that, while I might like this game, it won't like me. 

Still, obviously not going to turn it down just for that. Claimed.

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons - "Guide two brothers on an epic fairy tale journey from visionary Swedish film director, Josef Fares and top-tier developer Starbreeze Studios. Control both brothers at once as you experience co-op play in single player mode, like never before." £10.99 on Steam. Rating: Very Positive.

This looks amazing. Visually, that is. The screenshots are stunning and the game looks even more impressive in the gameplay videos. I confess I have never heard of "visionary Swedish film director, Josef Fares", but I assume his involvement explains the cinematic feel of the whole thing. 

On the face of it, this seems like it would be a gimme but dig a little deeper and the warning signs begin to flash. It looks extremely wholesome, even child-friendly, in the promotional material, so it's a surprise to find this stern warning on the Steam page: "This Game may contain content not appropriate for all ages, or may not be appropriate for viewing at work: Frequent Violence or Gore, General Mature Content".

That I could deal with but I have more of a problem with the even stricter caveat, in bold and with an orange border, presumably so you can't say you missed it and ask for your money back: "Notice: Brothers - A Tale of Two Sons requires a controller to play." 

And I could deal with that, too. I bought a controller a while back for just these sorts of situations. But not for situations like this: "Control both brothers at once as you experience co-op play in single player mode, like never before. Solve puzzles, explore the varied locations and fight boss battles, controlling one brother with each thumbstick."

Yeah, that sounds a bit much. Then again, maybe not. One reviewer disputes the necessity: "Despite Steam's notice, Brothers does not need a controller to play. " Guess I'll just to have to play it myself and find out. Claimed.

Desert Child - "You are a hungry, young hoverbike racer who needs to get off Earth before it E-X-P-L-O-D-E-S. Hunt bounties, throw races, and do whatever you can to get to Mars and win the Grand Prix." £8.99 on Steam. Rating: Mostly Positive.

I was going to throw this one a hard pass until I spotted something deep in the pitch: "Explore a pixel-art solar system inspired by Cowboy Bebop, Akira and Redline". And then this, too: "Chill to an original lo-fi hip-hop soundtrack". Some of those are things I like...

The reviews on Steam are fascinatingly polarised, veering from "one of the worst games I've reviewed for Steam, as I was physically repelled by the experience" to "a rare game that puts style over substance and still comes out compelling and fun, despite the extremely simple core." 

Why the hell not? Quite looking forward to trying it now. Claimed.

Spinch - "Transcend the material realm and assume your true form as Spinch, a hyper-agile organism consumed by the quest to rescue a litter of its missing offspring, in this side-scrolling, psychedelic platformer from the mind of award-winning Canadian cartoonist, Jesse Jacobs. " £11.39 on Steam. Rating: Mostly Positive.

Finally, something I can reject. I watched a few seconds of video and the aesthetic is a lot more pleasing in full sound and movement but I still wouldn't want to be stuck with it for more than a minute or two. Plus, y'know, side-scolling platformer. Not my thing at all. Not Claimed.

And that's it for the app. Let's just check the website because, as we know, there's always something more lurking over there...

Oh, yeah.. Quake.  There's that. I don't think I need to describe Quake to anyone, do I? Didn't play it back then, not going to play it now. Not Claimed. 

Finally, something called Rose Riddle 2: Werewolf Shadow, which momentarily looked intriguing but turned out to be yet another timewaster from Legacy Games. I think I've learned my lesson there. Not Claimed.

Quake needs a link from your Amazon account to the Epic Games store and Rose Riddle requires a similar link to Legacy. Just in case you were going to rush off to grab one of them.

So, on to the in-game loot for games I might one day play... except, for the first time ever, there isn't any. Well, there is but I've already claimed it all. 

Maybe the web page is still on Amazon time. I'll check back in a few days but if even I find anything new, I'll probably keep it to myself. I think once a month is plenty for posts like this. Let's all meet back here in January and we'll do it all over again.

They Come From A Land... Go On, You Can Finish The Rest.

I had a plan for today's post. That was my first mistake. Never plan ahead.

It started on Saturday, when I realised it was the first of October. I'd already done a post for that day and I wasn't intending to post at all on Sunday because I'd be working, so I mentally pencilled in Monday for the next instalment of "What's Amazon Giving Away This Month?"

Unfortunately, as I should have remembered, Amazon doesn't begin the month on the first. They're beyond that kind of conventional numbering. Last month's free offers don't expire until today. I just checked and there's nothing new up yet.

That post's going to have to wait until tomorrow, then. I did toy with the idea of not posting anything at all but I wasn't comfortable with skipping another day. I had a few other ideas but they didn't come together, so here we are with that old staple of quick fixes - a music post!

Luckily, I had one already simmering. A week or so ago, Magi Was Taken at Indiecator put up a post featuring some of his current favorite Australian bands. The selection wasn't entirely to my taste but I do very much agree with Magi that a lot of good music is coming out of Australia these days. 

After I read Magi's post I went trawling through YouTube, looking for some new-to-me bands from the other side of the planet I thought might be worth pointing up here. It really didn't take me very long at all to find some. 

I had to have somewhere to start, of course, and where better than a local radio station? Okay, with government funding, a national reach and a global presence by way of the worldwide web, it's stretching the definition of "local" to breaking point, but TripleJ is at least based in Australia and supposedly "places a greater emphasis on broadcasting Australian content compared to commercial stations", at least according to Wikipedia.

More to the point, I'm subbed to their covers series, Like A Version, so it's in my face every time I look at YouTube. I tried the most recent Australian act I saw there, which happened to be The Bouys. Not a very promising name but I knew the song they were covering and it was a very curious choice...

...which I'm not going to share. Yet. I'm saving it for Halloween. It's perfect.

That doesn't mean we aren't going to get anything by them. We are. We're getting this one.

Red Flags - The Bouys

Not crazy about the rawk guitar, if I'm honest, but I love the rest of it. Also, it's super-upbeat, which always makes me happy. I get why they're called "The Bouys" now, too. Most amusing.

That put a ton of interesting suggestions all down the right-hand side. It was hard to know where to go next but one title stood right out.

Canberra - Suzi

Can't really get more Australian than the name of the capital city. Suzi really brings that Australian accent to the fore, too. I wanted to check the full lyric before I said too much about the song but I can't find it on any of the usual sites. From what I can hear, though, I'm getting the feeling Suzi isn't feeling too enthusiastic about her home town. A line like "I'm never going back to Canberra" will tend to give that impression.

My next choice doesn't come from the YouTube algorithm for once. It's more of a personal suggestion from one of Suzi's band, Declan Long, the guitar player. Not that I know him personally, you understand. It's more the t-shirt he's wearing, which he helpfully doesn't change even when he's pretending to be a bartender in the video.

The t-shirt, which kinda looks like he made it himself, says "Teenage Joans". When I saw it I thought two things: 

1. Is that the name of a band? 
2. I really hope that's the name of a band!

It's the name of a band. And they're as good as their name suggests.

Something About Being Sixteen - Teenage Joans

I love the production on this. It's so thick. I love that guitar sound, too. I could live without yet another food fight video but at least the pastel colors make it a little less unpleasant to watch than most. 

Teenage Joans are two people, neither called Joan and pretty soon neither to be teenagers either. They've won a shedload of awards in Australia, which means no-one else on the planet has ever heard of them, I imagine. Must be hell for a musician, being so far from the center of the musical universe. Or maybe it's heaven. How would I know?

One idea for a music post that's been floating around in the shallows of my mind for a while is something about bands that use the word "Teen" or "Teenage", either in thier name or their song titles. There are plenty of them and it's a word redolent with associations, positive, negative and every other kind of tive.

If I ever get round to writing it I'm sure Teenage Joans will make another appearance and so will this next bunch, who did come up as a suggestion on YouTube.

Girl Sports - Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers

Now that's a great riff. Also, can't beat a shouted response chorus. Killer dropout, too. This is one that sounds better every time you hear it and it sounded pretty damn good the first time.

I'm guessing it's no co-incidence their name sounds so reminiscent of another (in)famously aggressive, uncompromising female-led act, the incomparable Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. Or maybe it is. 1978 was a very long time ago.

Write A Song Sounds Shit - Turpentine Babycino

While we're on the subject of band names or song titles that remind you of other band names or song titles but you're not quite sure if they're meant to... What are the chances these guys ever heard Baby Turpentine by Crazyhead? Part of the largely-forgotten Grebo scene of the late 'eighties, Crazyhead, if they're remembered at all, are probably best known for their #2 hit "What Gives You The Idea That You're So Amazing, Baby?" That's #2 on the indie charts. I don't believe they ever troubled the real Top 40.

It's not such a stretch to imagine a connection all the same. Write A Song Sounds Shit is the most pop-punk of all the tunes in this little collection but it does have something of that boho swagger Grebo tried so hard to become famous for. And if there was one thing Grebo bands understood better than almost anyone it was the value of an eyecatching title linked to an earworm of a chorus. This has both.

And finally... what's Australia best-known for? Kangaroos? Sharks? Unrealistic levels of self-confidence? No - endless sunshine, of course!

Factor 50 - Medicine Cabinet

Now that's about as unpromising a song/band name combo as you could hope to avoid, isn't it? Who calls their band "Medicine Cabinet" anyway, ffs? It reminds me of a band-naming session I once had when I was in my late teens and my friend Paul kept suggesting anything he could see around him - "The Walls", "The Floor" - presumably on the grounds it had worked out pretty well for The Doors, not to mention The Table.

It kinda works, though. I literally clicked through to see just how bad it could be and guess what? It was great! Reminds me the hell of something but I cannot for the life of me say what. Actually, several somethings, different songs in different places. It's a gestalt.

And that's all I have for now. It's enough, I reckon.

Amazon freebies tomorrow, assuming Jeff's minions have gotten their act together by then.