Amazon stops development of fantasy sports game Breakaway

Wes went hands-on with Amazon's 4v4 fantasy sports game Breakaway in 2016, and Amanda did the same last year when it was in alpha. Both were left with more questions than answers, and wondered whether its mish-mash of ideas would come together into something coherent. Sadly, the answer is no: Amazon Game Studios has officially stopped development of the game.

The studio announced the move in a Reddit post yesterday, saying that it hadn't made the breakthroughs that it had hoped to. "While we have developed many ideas and made a lot of progress, we are also setting a very high bar for ourselves," it said. "In spite of our efforts, we didn’t achieve the breakthrough that made the game what we all hoped it could be. After a lot of soul searching, the team decided to focus on new ideas. As a result, Breakaway is no longer in active development."

The team said they would only return to the game if a "thunderbolt of inspiration strikes", but for now we can assume it won't see the light of day, at least for a long time.

It's sad, really—I was initially intrigued by its mix of basketball and ability-driven combat, and perhaps there's a good game to be made from it bones. Keep your eyes peeled for what the team decides to work on next.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.