Amazon Is Publishing The Next Tomb Raider — What Does That Mean?

Some weird news entered the video game industry in the last few hours — Amazon is getting involved in Tomb Raider. Hearing this name in relation to the brand is rather unexpected, as for one thing, the TR property is currently owned by someone who ISN’T Amazon, and two, Amazon rarely gets involved in things it can’t own 100%.

Tomb Raider, and all Eidos-originated Western World properties that used to be owned by Square Enix, were dumped by that company last year and picked up by Embracer Group, the Norse organization you’ve never heard of that owns half of everything. Did Embracer sell TR? No, not really. Is a studio within Amazon making the game? No, it’s not that either — Crystal Dynamics is still responsible for development.

Amazon is merely distributing the next game….and not exclusively either. It will appear on ALL next-gen platforms whenever it gets done, just with an “AMAZON GAMES” logo on the bottom left corner of the box. We don’t see what they could possibly get out of this either. It’s a very un-Amazon-like move.

It’s still going to be a while before we see this game anyway — it was announced just last April that it was going into production, and a sparkling AAA game like the ones Lara usually stars in takes years to create. For the record, the last mainline Tomb Raider game was released in 2018.