In Tokyo's gaming district of Akihabara, the shelves are stacked with racing titles promising ever more realistic physics and ever shinier car bodies. What they rarely promise is a story worth caring about. That gap is precisely what UK developer Maverick Games set out to fill, and this week the studio found itself without a financial engine to keep it moving, after The Game Business reported that Amazon has terminated its publishing agreement with the studio.
Maverick was founded in 2022 by veterans of Playground Games, the British studio responsible for the celebrated Forza Horizon series. At its helm sits Mike Brown, who served as creative director on Forza Horizon 5, alongside studio head Harinder Sangha, a former boss at Sega Hardlight and Sumo Leamington. Amazon signed on in May 2024 to publish the studio's untitled, narrative-led open-world racing title for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S, positioning it as a triple-A challenger in a genre that has long prioritised speed over substance.
Amazon's exit was framed in the polished language of corporate pivot. "As part of our strategic evolution to focus on projects that leverage Amazon's unique strengths and scale, including the recent re-launch of Luna and our Tomb Raider franchise partnership with Crystal Dynamics, we have decided to release Maverick Games from their publishing agreement with Amazon Game Studios," an Amazon spokesperson told The Game Business. The company added that the decision would give Maverick "the flexibility to find a publishing partner whose strategic priorities are better aligned with bringing their game to market."
The statement is diplomatically worded, but the underlying logic is straightforward: Amazon is retreating from original intellectual property and consolidating around existing brands. The two upcoming Amazon Games Tomb Raider titles in development with Crystal Dynamics carry far less commercial risk than funding a brand-new IP from a studio that has yet to ship a single product. For a company with shareholders to answer to, the arithmetic is not hard to follow.
The departure is part of a broader and increasingly costly retreat from games by Amazon. The company wound down its MMO New World after years of investment, shut down live-service co-op title King of Meat just months after its October 2025 launch, and sold its unfinished MOBA March of Giants to Ubisoft. King of Meat's failure was particularly stark: developer Glowmade had targeted around 100,000 concurrent players at launch, but the game peaked at just 320 on Steam, even during a promotional free weekend. Amazon's head of Game Studios, Christoph Hartmann, who had publicly championed the Maverick deal at signing, departed the company earlier this year.
There is a reasonable case to be made that Amazon's broader gaming struggles reflect not a failure of any individual title but a structural one: the company attempted to compete in a fiercely competitive creative industry by applying the same logic it uses for logistics and cloud infrastructure, assuming that capital and scale would substitute for culture and craft. As PC Gamer noted in its coverage of Amazon's October 2025 retrenchment, the company seemingly believed it could throw money at the problem. The gaming industry, with its notoriously unpredictable creative returns, rarely rewards that approach.
For Maverick, however, the story does not end here. Brown and Sangha confirmed the split on LinkedIn, stating that development of their debut title "continues to progress as strongly as planned" and that they are "in active dialogue with partners who share our long-term ambition" for the project. The studio plans to share more information later this year, which suggests a new publisher arrangement may already be taking shape rather than Maverick scrambling from a standing start.
What makes this studio worth watching, beyond the pedigree of its founders, is the creative bet it is placing. In a genre where narrative is usually an afterthought bolted onto a handling model, Maverick has recruited Jamie Brittain, co-creator of the influential British teen drama Skins, as lead writer. Brown has spoken about wanting characters who are "flawed and actually a little bit weird," aiming for the kind of human connection that racing games almost never attempt. It is a genuinely ambitious design philosophy, and one that carries real risk; story-heavy racing games have produced both standout experiences and forgettable misfires in roughly equal measure.
The broader question this episode raises is one the games industry has been slow to reckon with. As large technology companies pull back from original creative investment, where does the funding go? The consolidation of publishing risk around established franchises, from Tomb Raider to Call of Duty, leaves ambitious mid-size projects in an increasingly precarious position. Independent studios with genuine creative vision find themselves dependent on a shrinking pool of publishers willing to back unproven ideas.
At the same time, it is worth acknowledging the genuine tension here. Publishers are businesses, not arts patrons, and the extraordinary cost of developing a triple-A title demands a credible path to commercial return. Expecting Amazon or any comparable company to absorb open-ended creative risk indefinitely is not a sustainable model either. The studios that thrive in this environment tend to be those that can articulate both their creative vision and their commercial proposition with equal clarity.
Maverick has the creative credibility. With Playground Games releasing Forza Horizon 6 this year, the appetite for high-quality open-world racing experiences is clearly not diminishing. Whether another publisher sees what Amazon apparently decided it could not prioritise is the question the studio now needs to answer. Given the talent involved, the odds of finding a willing partner seem reasonable. The road ahead is uncertain, but it is not closed.