Newsbrief: Notable game designer Clint Hocking, best known for his work on the Splinter Cell franchise at Ubisoft, has left Amazon Game Studios, Gamasutra has confirmed. The news first appeared in a story from IGN.

In 2014, Amazon began to make a big investment in its new Amazon Game Studios -- hiring Hocking and Portal dev Kim Swift, snapping up studios like Double Helix, and investing in third-party games. The studio began to aggressively recruit for its first PC title in June.

If you're curious what Amazon's been up to, you can read a full and frank postmortem of Til Morning's Light, its WayForward-developed mobile horror adventure, which Gamasutra published last week.

Update: Another one of Amazon's high profile employees has also jumped ship, with Eric Nylund, who left his role as director of narrative design at Microsoft to take up the mantle at Amazon Game Studios in 2013, revealing his departure via Linkedin.