Amazon's Lumberyard-powered brawler Breakaway is no more

After a lengthy hiatus, Amazon Game Studios has officially ended development on its stream-focused fantasy brawler Breakaway.

The game was one of the first in-house titles announced to use Amazon’s Lumberyard game development engine shortly after the Twitch and Amazon Web Service friendly engine was unveiled. Notably, it was one of three titles announced in 2016 just as Amazon began its big push to position Lumberyard as an engine for social, streamable games. 

Like New World and Crucible announced alongside it, Breakaway was to highlight a number of social features that developers can integrate directly from Lumberyard through the engine’s Twitch and AWS capabilities and was built with “fast action, teamwork, and live streaming" in mind.

The game had previously been on a development hiatus as the team looked at ways to rework Breakaway's core gameplay following feedback gained from a four-month-long Alpha test.

Until its essential cancellation was announced over Reddit this weekend, the game was being developed by Amazon-owned Double Helix Games. In that Reddit post, the team shared that Breakaway would no longer be in active development, but that they could return to the project at a later date if the right kind of “inspiration strikes.”

“Since our last announcement, we have worked to implement community feedback and iterate on Breakaway’s core gameplay. While we have developed many ideas and made a lot of progress, we are also setting a very high bar for ourselves,” reads the post. “In spite of our efforts, 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. As a result, Breakaway is no longer in active development.”