Amazon Game Studios (AGS) is dead before it even released their first game. How do I know this? Because they signed John “After EQ1 everything I touch burns to the ground, with each failure burning faster then the one before” Smedly, and not only to be part of the team, they also gave him an entire studio. Honestly how does this even happen?
Smedly ‘helped define the modern MMO’ it says. Really? Smed defined (some of?) EQ1, yes, but he hasn’t defined a single thing since, and modern MMOs sure as hell aren’t like EQ1 when Smed was working on it. You know what Smed has recently defined? How to fail at Kickstarter, then fail on Steam via the same game people repeatedly told him they don’t want. That’s the kind of resume you look at over at Amazon and think “yea, lets invest a lot of money and resources into that track record”?
This is a big reason why the MMO genre is a dumpster fire outside of EVE right now. A guy has one hit title years and years ago, then turns in a meh product (Planetside 1), goes on to make a more meh product (Planetside 2), gets Sony to dump that entire studio under his leadership, gets that picked up by some VC group, then gets dumped by that group, and to top it all off comes back and his next project was so terribly nothing it couldn’t even stay on Steam, the freaking land of a million ‘do nothing’ games. And people at the top look at that and go “yea, this is our guy!”.
Can’t wait to see how this all turns out (it turns out horribly and people lose jobs while Smed most likely goes to the next pony show, because the MMO genre hates you).
Hardcore Casual 
Holy shnikees this is negative even for you.
Is it? At this point what level of faith do you have in Smed making something that:
A: Launches
B: Doesn’t suck
Because Vegas would have to give me crazy-ass odds to put any money on Smed here.
What was the game that fell off of Steam?
Heroes Song.
I think you are discounting Amazon here. Bezos gets into every project and enforces a pretty strict corporate culture. I would bet on Bezos in any test of who is really running the show. They are betting that there is something Smed brings to the table, and my prediction would be Smed departing quietly if he cannot adapt to the Amazon way or doesn’t have anything to offer.
That’s kind of a best case scenario though; Amazon realizes what Smed really brings (nothing) and removes him before too much time/money is wasted. That, or more Heroes Song-like quality is produced in the new studio Smed is running.
Plus I’m not sure how much attention all of this is going to actually get from Bezos. He might check in occasionally, but he has much bigger fish to fry over at Amazon than a game studio.
For his part in the NGE for Star Wars Galaxies, Smed actually had a hand in getting me to try Eve the *first time* waaay back when.
Must be a brilliant interviewer