Amazon taps John Smedley to lead new San Diego game studio

Newsbrief: Amazon Game Studios has set up shop in San Diego with the formation of an all-new studio and team, set to be headed up by former Daybreak CEO and MMO pioneer John Smedley. 

Smedley has worked on games like Star Wars: Galaxies and H1Z1, but is no doubt best known for his decades of work with Sony Online Entertainment and for his part in the creation of Everquest. After leaving SOE in 2015, he founded Pixelmage Games and started work on the 2D action RPG Hero’s Song.

Going forward, Smedley is leading the San Diego team on an unannounced project set to take advantage of the AWS Cloud and Twitch integration features offered within Amazon’s own game engine, Lumberyard.