Amazon to “Refine” Prime Gaming Perks After New Layoffs

Amazon has just laid off about 180 employees in its games division and is planning to refocus its Prime Gaming benefits for Amazon Prime subscribers. Christoph Hartmann, vice president of Amazon Games announced the news today in an email to employees obtained by Reuters, which also mentions “org-wide teams changes.

Amazon previously eliminated around 100 jobs in its games unit in April, and Reuters is reporting that the company also laid off employees in its music and podcast division last week. Overall, Amazon may have laid off approximately 27,000 employees since it announced significant job cuts back in November 2022.

“After our initial restructuring in April, it became clear that we needed to focus our resources even more on the areas that are growing with the highest potential to drive our business forward,” Hartmann said in the email to employees. “We’ve listened to our customers and we know delivering free games every month is what they want most, so we are refining our Prime benefit to increase our focus there,” the exec added.

Amazon’s Prime Gaming benefits currently include various free perks including in-game content, downloadable games, and one free monthly Twitch channel subscription. If you’re in the US, UK, Canada, and Germany, you also get access to a rotating selection of games on Luna, Amazon’s cloud gaming service that launched last year to little fanfare.

If you need an active Prime membership ($139/year) to claim free Prime games every month, these titles will be yours to keep even after you decide to cancel your Prime membership. However, the free Prime games that the company offers every month are… rarely great.

Usually, games that are free to claim on Amazon’s own PC game launcher are really obscure. However, those that need to be claimed on Gog.com or the Epic Games Store are much better: This month, that includes Bethesda’s Rage 2 and Doom 3, two games that are also available on Microsoft’s Game Pass service.

It’s not clear yet if Amazon will get rid of in-game perks and other Prime Gaming benefits. You may remember that Amazon Prime also used to include an ad-free experience on Twitch, but this free “Twitch Prime” perk was discontinued back in 2018.