Amazon reportedly cancels Thor game after AI mandate and layoffs

Amazon’s latest gaming cut left Project Trident dead after an AI mandate forced a creative reset and layoffs followed anyway. The canceled game had been a comedic third-person action title set in a Nordic world, built around a fictional parody company called Valhalla Ventures, and it had already been through one major reinvention before the plug was pulled.

Project Trident started life as something different: a four-player co-op action game with a more serious tone, complete with huge-monster encounters that were compared to Shadow of the Colossus. By the time Amazon pushed the studio toward a new direction in mid-2024, the team was trying to reshape the project into something more explicitly AI-driven. The planned AI features were meant to help with player-NPC conversations and some animation polish, including lip-syncing, while the art, music, story, and core gameplay were still being built by developers.

That pivot did not save the game. People familiar with the project described a scramble inside the studio as the team tried to make the mandate work, only to be hit with layoffs anyway. Amazon told Eurogamer that AI was not the reason for the layoffs, and framed the cuts as part of a broader strategic shift toward where the company believed it could deliver the most value to players.

The Trident cancellation lands in the middle of a wider Amazon Games reset. On October 28, 2025, Amazon announced 14,000 corporate layoffs, and the games division was included in the reductions. Steve Boom said the company had decided to halt a significant amount of first-party AAA game development, especially MMOs, and cut roles in Irvine, San Diego, and central publishing. At the same time, Amazon said it would keep working with Crystal Dynamics on a new Tomb Raider game, with Maverick Games on an open-world driving title, and with its Montreal studio on March of Giants.

Amazon’s Luna relaunch adds another layer to the picture. The service has been repositioned around social party games and Prime value, and Amazon has already pushed Courtroom Chaos: Starring Snoop Dogg as a human-built, AI-powered game. Put together, the moves make Project Trident look less like a weird one-off and more like a company trying to force games into a corporate plan that kept changing under the developers making them.