Amazon Games today announced that it will publish the next Tomb Raider game from Crystal Dynamics.
Crystal Dynamics first teased this new Tomb Raider title during an Unreal Engine 5 showcase in March. Shortly thereafter, Square Enix sold Crystal Dynamics — as well as its sister studios Eidos Montreal and Square Enix Montreal — to Embracer Group for $300 million. This obviously left the new Tomb Raider without a publisher, and rather than self-publishin,g Crystal Dynamics has decided to partner with Amazon Games.
“With Amazon Games, we found a team that shares our creative vision, ambitions, and values for a Lara Croft universe across the spectrum of possibilities,” Crystal Dynamics head of studio Scot Amos said in a press release. “They’re uniquely positioned to rewrite what publishing and development collaborations are, and we’re eager to forge this new path together, starting with building the biggest and best Tomb Raider game yet.”
Details on this new Tomb Raider are still quite scarce, but Crystal Dynamics does tease in the aforementioned press release that it is a single-player, narrative-focused game “that rewards exploration and creative pathfinding, with mind-bending puzzles to solve, and a wide variety of enemies to face and overcome.” The next Tomb Raider game is in “early development,” so it has no release date, but we do know that it will be a multiplatform release.
Amazon Games has struggled to get a foothold in the gaming space despite setting up multiple game developers. It has found success in the MMO space with games like New World and Lost Ark though, and recently announced at The Game Awards its plans to publish anime-inspired MMO Blue Protocol in 2023. This Tomb Raider game will likely be Amazon Games’ next big chance to make a good impression in the single-player gaming space. An email from an Amazon Games public relations representative to Digital Trends also teased that “the Amazon Games internal studios in Montreal and San Diego are still hard at work on several unannounced projects.”
