5 ms·

Has Amazon provided anything useful to gaming space? They have bought lots of companies, but their track record in gaming space seems to be very poor.

giancarlostoro 6y ago
They used to have "Kindle Underground" or whatever, for the Kindle Fire tablets, but they shut that down. Basically you'd get free upgrades to games and stuff at no cost. I used it to play games I'd have on Android for free without having to pay for upgrades. I also returned the same tablet two days later cause it had a dead pixel when I opened it.
- mysterydip 6y ago
  Amazon Underground, and as a hobbyist game developer it's the most money I've made on a mobile platform. I was sad to see it go. I put the same game on Amazon, Play, and App stores, with the same (minimal) advertising, and underground was an order of magnitude more profitable.
  - ALittleLight 6y ago
    Is that more profitable per user, or more profitable total?
    - OJFord 6y ago
      How can you have either without the other?
      - strombofulous 6y ago
        $1 per 1000 users on a store that gets you 100 users pays more than $0.01 per 1000 users on a store that gets you 1000.
        OJFord 6y ago
        Right, I think I missed some implicit context here.
      - entropicdrifter 6y ago
        Easy. You get a publisher who takes a cut of the per-user profits but who promotes your game and gets you significantly more users, enough so that you end up making more total profit than you would have without the publisher.
        OJFord 6y ago
        I wouldn't call that 'profit', if it's before deducting an expense like that.
    - mysterydip 6y ago
      More profitable total. Took a lot more users to make the same profit as one sale on the app stores, but because it was free for the end user a lot more played it. Something like a couple hundred paid on the stores, but over a hundred thousand played the underground version.
  - giancarlostoro 6y ago
    That's a shame, I wondered if it was just not profitable for Amazon's end, it sounded too good to be true. I remember the model was... the longer people play your games, the more you make... I guess they didn't think that one through? I don't like subscriptions for games, but a subscription for mobile games I might consider if it keeps the spyware off my phone. I usually opt to pay to remove ads from any games I play long enough. I'm sure I'm one of the rare few though.
    - mysterydip 6y ago
      Yeah I didn't understand how they planned to make it work long-term, but it was great while it lasted.
cheeze 6y ago
Their commercial games have all been flops. They do provide cloud infra for game servers as well, but I have no idea if that's useful or what adoption looks like
- danudey 6y ago
  Well, AWS and scalability is incredibly useful for game launches; while Fall Guys might be a bad example, you can easily see where well-architected scalability would help. Being able to burst up to 100k+ concurrents at launch and then drop down to, say, 50k, or 20k, is a massive cost savings compared to buying (or leasing) capacity for 100k users and then having most of it sit idle. I dislike AWS for most projects, since, without any sort of large-scale discount or negotiation, it's vastly more expensive than dedicated hardware, but if I were launching a game like Fall Guys I'd want to launch in AWS, and then migrate to dedicated hosting or hybrid-cloud once things are more even-keeled and you know what your usage patterns are like. That said, that's not specific to AWS. I can get the same thing on Azure, Google Cloud, Tencent Cloud, etc.
rockostrich 6y ago
Their game studio published its first big game a couple of months ago called Crucible. It was not good... It basically just ripped off all of the bits of recent popular games without doing anything new. They had an MMO called New World scheduled to launch this month but it was delayed until at least 2021.
- kevincox 6y ago
  Sounds like the AmazonBasics strategy.
- Arelius 6y ago
  Prior to this they released The Grand Tour Video Game, a tie in to their Prime Video series of the same name. It was also generally poorly received. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Tour_Game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Tour_Game
huffmsa 6y ago
Everyone runs their servers on AWS. I say everyone, definitely Valve, and I'd assume quite a few other firms. So there's that to start
- Arelius 6y ago
  Sony as well.
perseusmandate 6y ago
They offer a Crytek derived game engine called Lumberyard used for the long-running Star Citizen scam
detaro 6y ago
Free game engine, but not sure if it has significant users.
kevincox 6y ago
They seem to be doing a great job running Twitch which brings in a lot of attention, marketing and revenue to the gaming industry. I'm not sure if any of this is Amazon's influence or just the Twitch folk continuing momentum but either way it still seems to be improving.
- adreamingsoul 6y ago
  Twitch is fairly independent from Amazon and AWS.
  - pluc 6y ago
    and what is this if not an attempt to dilute the Twitch brand in favour of the more Amazon-oriented Prime umbrella?
    - Arelius 6y ago
      I think Twitch Prime was never very close to Twitch from an organizational perspective. My read is this that this moves likely gives Twitch as an organization more autonomy.
phjesusthatguy3 6y ago
$970 million[0] to Twitch and a storefront from which to buy games. [0]https://kotaku.com/reports-amazon-to-buy-twitch-for-over-1-billion-1626564744 https://kotaku.com/reports-amazon-to-buy-twitch-for-over-1-b...

giancarlostoro 6y ago

They used to have "Kindle Underground" or whatever, for the Kindle Fire tablets, but they shut that down. Basically you'd get free upgrades to games and stuff at no cost. I used it to play games I'd have on Android for free without having to pay for upgrades. I also returned the same tablet two days later cause it had a dead pixel when I opened it.

mysterydip 6y ago
Amazon Underground, and as a hobbyist game developer it's the most money I've made on a mobile platform. I was sad to see it go. I put the same game on Amazon, Play, and App stores, with the same (minimal) advertising, and underground was an order of magnitude more profitable.
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  Is that more profitable per user, or more profitable total?
  - OJFord 6y ago
    How can you have either without the other?
    - strombofulous 6y ago
      $1 per 1000 users on a store that gets you 100 users pays more than $0.01 per 1000 users on a store that gets you 1000.
      - OJFord 6y ago
        Right, I think I missed some implicit context here.
    - entropicdrifter 6y ago
      Easy. You get a publisher who takes a cut of the per-user profits but who promotes your game and gets you significantly more users, enough so that you end up making more total profit than you would have without the publisher.
      - OJFord 6y ago
        I wouldn't call that 'profit', if it's before deducting an expense like that.
  - mysterydip 6y ago
    More profitable total. Took a lot more users to make the same profit as one sale on the app stores, but because it was free for the end user a lot more played it. Something like a couple hundred paid on the stores, but over a hundred thousand played the underground version.
- giancarlostoro 6y ago
  That's a shame, I wondered if it was just not profitable for Amazon's end, it sounded too good to be true. I remember the model was... the longer people play your games, the more you make... I guess they didn't think that one through? I don't like subscriptions for games, but a subscription for mobile games I might consider if it keeps the spyware off my phone. I usually opt to pay to remove ads from any games I play long enough. I'm sure I'm one of the rare few though.
  - mysterydip 6y ago
    Yeah I didn't understand how they planned to make it work long-term, but it was great while it lasted.

cheeze 6y ago

Their commercial games have all been flops. They do provide cloud infra for game servers as well, but I have no idea if that's useful or what adoption looks like

danudey 6y ago
Well, AWS and scalability is incredibly useful for game launches; while Fall Guys might be a bad example, you can easily see where well-architected scalability would help. Being able to burst up to 100k+ concurrents at launch and then drop down to, say, 50k, or 20k, is a massive cost savings compared to buying (or leasing) capacity for 100k users and then having most of it sit idle. I dislike AWS for most projects, since, without any sort of large-scale discount or negotiation, it's vastly more expensive than dedicated hardware, but if I were launching a game like Fall Guys I'd want to launch in AWS, and then migrate to dedicated hosting or hybrid-cloud once things are more even-keeled and you know what your usage patterns are like. That said, that's not specific to AWS. I can get the same thing on Azure, Google Cloud, Tencent Cloud, etc.

rockostrich 6y ago

Their game studio published its first big game a couple of months ago called Crucible. It was not good... It basically just ripped off all of the bits of recent popular games without doing anything new. They had an MMO called New World scheduled to launch this month but it was delayed until at least 2021.

kevincox 6y ago
Sounds like the AmazonBasics strategy.
Arelius 6y ago
Prior to this they released The Grand Tour Video Game, a tie in to their Prime Video series of the same name. It was also generally poorly received. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Tour_Game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Tour_Game

huffmsa 6y ago

Everyone runs their servers on AWS. I say everyone, definitely Valve, and I'd assume quite a few other firms. So there's that to start

Arelius 6y ago
Sony as well.

perseusmandate 6y ago

They offer a Crytek derived game engine called Lumberyard used for the long-running Star Citizen scam

detaro 6y ago

Free game engine, but not sure if it has significant users.

kevincox 6y ago

They seem to be doing a great job running Twitch which brings in a lot of attention, marketing and revenue to the gaming industry. I'm not sure if any of this is Amazon's influence or just the Twitch folk continuing momentum but either way it still seems to be improving.

adreamingsoul 6y ago
Twitch is fairly independent from Amazon and AWS.
- pluc 6y ago
  and what is this if not an attempt to dilute the Twitch brand in favour of the more Amazon-oriented Prime umbrella?
  - Arelius 6y ago
    I think Twitch Prime was never very close to Twitch from an organizational perspective. My read is this that this moves likely gives Twitch as an organization more autonomy.

phjesusthatguy3 6y ago

$970 million[0] to Twitch and a storefront from which to buy games. [0]https://kotaku.com/reports-amazon-to-buy-twitch-for-over-1-billion-1626564744 https://kotaku.com/reports-amazon-to-buy-twitch-for-over-1-b...