Amazon getting out of the games business? Significant cuts to its operations have been announced.

Making games is tough, but making a living-breathing MMO is even harder. A message was sent to Amazon staff notifying them that the company would be eliminating more than 14,000 jobs, which many of those affected would be in their game development and publishing business. This came via “Bloomberg,” who were able to view the statement.

Studios behind titles like New World and the upcoming The Lord of the Rings game, have been hit with significant staff reductions, according to vice president of Audio, Twitch, and Games, Steve Boom.

“While we’re proud of our successes in first-party AAA game development and publishing, we have made the difficult decision to halt a significant amount of our first-party AAA game development work, specifically around MMOs, within Amazon Game Studios,” he wrote. Amazon Games won't be completely leaving the gaming space as the memo states. Amazon will continue its work on current game projects such as, Maverick Games’ open world driving game and the upcoming Tomb Raider in collaboration with Crystal Dynamics.

“While these changes are significant, we still have a lot going on in game development,” Boom wrote. “Our Montreal studio recently concluded a successful closed alpha of March of Giants and is working hard to finish the game. You can check out our full preview of March of Giants “here.”

“If you were to trace the arc of what we’ve released and what we’ve now announced from our games studio, it would actually point in this direction,” Boom said. “So what started out in massively multiplayer games, MMOs, we’ve really widened the aperture, if you will. And so you’ve seen announcements for like things like ‘King of Meat,’ ‘Tomb Raider,’ our upcoming driving game, ‘Lord of the Rings,’ and kind of moving more in that direction of what I would call console-friendly titles, known IPs or known play patterns. The MMOs, those are really PC games. We launched ‘New World’ on consoles about a year ago, and it’s done really, really well, but those games at their core appeal to the hardest core-PC gamers.”

Amazon isn’t leaving the gaming space, but rather, readjusting as they look towards the future of their games catalog to see what aligns with fans rather than focusing on MMOs that are more PC oriented.

What do you think of the Amazon giant and their changes? Let us know in the comments.