Amazon Games has reportedly eased up on guidelines that allowed the company to claim the rights of personal projects worked on by employees outside of work hours.
The elimination of the rules, which Bloomberg reports has come into force immediately, was apparently shared in a company email from the Head of Amazon Games Studios, Mike Frazzini.
"These policies were originally put in place over a decade ago when we had a lot less information and experience than we do today, and as a result, the policies were written quite broadly," Frazzini reportedly wrote.
The update to Amazon guidelines comes only a month after they originally came to light. Software engineer James Liu reportedly shared the policy in a tweet, which has since been deleted. The previous policies laid out rules that gave Amazon “a royalty-free, worldwide, fully paid-up, perpetual, transferable license” to IP rights for any games created by staff.
Amazon is not a stranger to studio controversy; previously it has seen struggles with both management and the company's in-house game engine.
In addition to the aforementioned struggles, Amazon Games has also seen a string of projects cancelled, shut down, and removed from sale. Perhaps the most notable of these were Crucible, a free-to-play multiplayer third-person shooter that the studio closed in November 2020, and a Grand Tour Game which was taken down from storefronts in late June 2020. Despite these setbacks, if New World's popular open beta is anything to go by, the studio may finally have a truly successful title on its hands.
Jared Moore is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.