(UPDATED With AGS Statement) Amazon Game Studios May Have Cancelled Breakaway

UPDATE: Amazon Game Studios has posted a message for players on the home page for Breakaway. There's no explicit statement that the game is slowing its development, but rather that the alphas have ended, the dev team is listening to player feedback, and "we’re letting our team take the time to iterate and evolve Breakaway's core gameplay to deliver what you've asked for." So it probably is going on a kind of hiatus for now, but the company seems optimistic that it will come back.

Original article: Amazon Game Studios' first big foray into the video game world might already be headed out to pasture. According to Kotaku, "two people familiar with plans for" Breakaway have confirmed that the esports-minded 4v4 brawler is on "indefinite hiatus," barely a year after its announcement and reveal, and just a few weeks after its last alpha test.

Amazon hired on a bunch of big names to help create its new gaming division, so if Breakaway fails to get off the ground, that's not a good sign. It also casts into doubt the company's other endeavors, such as the open-world survival game New World and battle-royale-style title Crucible, as well as whatever they had John Smedley working on.

Maybe it's not too surprising to see the game struggling to find its footing. There are a million arena battlers out there, and it's conceivable that, after several rounds of testing, AGS didn't think its game was distinctive enough to ... "break away" ... from the pack of similar titles. The renaming/rebranding of its characters, changing them from real historical warriors, like Spartacus and Anne Bonney, to heroes of a more mythical bent also struck us as peculiar.

There's no indication that those latter two games would be free-to-play, though we had ample evidence that Breakaway was/is planned for a F2P model, despite little in the way of official acknowledgement from AGS. We'll keep you updated if we learn more about Breakaway's fate.