Breakaway

Breakaway was Amazon Game Studios' first major swing at competitive gaming, a 4v4 mythological brawler revealed at TwitchCon 2016 that let you play as Spartacus, Morgan Le Fay, and Vlad the Impaler in a mashup of League of Legends, Power Stone, and Rocket League. It was built for Twitch streaming with integrated features designed to boost viewer engagement, and Amazon hyped it as the future of esports. Then development hell struck. By October 2017, Kotaku reported the game was "basically canceled," on "indefinite hiatus" internally while Amazon publicly pretended everything was fine. On March 31, 2018, Amazon made it official: Breakaway was dead. The statement was pure corporate therapy-speak: "We didn't achieve the breakthrough that made the game what we all hoped it could be. After a lot of soul searching, the team decided to focus on new ideas." Translation: multiple public tests showed nobody cared. StreamerHouse's 503-viewer peak in 2017 came during the beta when the game was still alive and Amazon was throwing money at influencers to pretend it mattered. Amazon left a tiny glimmer of hope that Breakaway could return "if a thunderbolt of inspiration strikes." Spoiler: it didn't. The team moved on to Crucible and New World, ensuring Amazon's game development failures remained diverse and plentiful.