Christoph Hartmann Reportedly Leaves Amazon Game Studios

The collaboration between Amazon Game Studios and German-American manager Christoph Hartmann has apparently come to an end. At least that is what can be gleaned from a post on Bluesky by Jason Schreier, a typically well-informed industry journalist from Bloomberg News. According to Schreier, Hartmann's departure is linked to Amazon's gradual withdrawal from the PC gaming business.

Hartmann is one of the most successful Germans in the international gaming business. He joined Amazon Game Studios in 2018 (in German) to put their ambitious gaming plans into action. Prior to that, he worked for Take-Two Interactive for almost two decades.

He joined the US group via the former Bertelsmann subsidiary BMG Interactive, which marketed the original GTA in the 1990s and was sold to the then relatively young US publisher Take-Two Interactive. Leading managers at BMG Entertainment, to which BMG Interactive belonged, at that time were Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick and Michael Dornemann, member of the Take Two Interactive board.

In the first few years after Take-Two's acquisition of BMG Interactive, Hartmann was responsible for establishing and expanding the German Take-Two office before being appointed Senior Vice President of Publishing at the company's headquarters in 2003 (in German). A year later, he founded the 2K label for Take-Two, which he then headed until 2017.