![]() The core idea of building out from Twitch to create a store which allows game streaming viewers to have a seamless purchase or subscription process for games they're watching on a stream, or that are recommended by their favourite streamers, is an obvious idea, but no less important for it. ![]() Steam, like Amazon, offers sellers a vast audience to engage with, something other stores have struggled to recreate Maybe New World ends up being a huge hit, but even if it fizzles out, Twitch will still be pulling in gigantic audiences day after day. The company would undoubtedly like for its efforts at game development and publishing to bear some fruit, of course - it knows from its work on establishing Prime Video as a key streaming platform how important first-party content is - but the one genuinely successful thing it owns in the gaming space right now is Twitch, and it's logical to build out the rest of its ambitions from that platform rather than crossing its fingers and hoping really hard that one of its swings at launching a major online game hits it out of the park. That may not sound like anything groundbreaking, given Steam's continuing dominance of the PC digital distribution space - but it could well be a far more disruptive move than it appears at first glance.įirst up, it should be unsurprising that Twitch is really the heart of Amazon's gaming ambitions. Vapor seems, to all intents and purposes, to be a pretty fully-featured Steam competitor that's deeply integrated with Twitch - indeed, it wouldn't be surprising if the version of it we finally see officially is called something like the Twitch Games Store. ![]() In light of that, the confirmation that Amazon has been working on a digital distribution platform that's designed to compete with Steam - an objective that's even made perfectly clear by its working codename, "Vapor" - suddenly brings quite a few things into focus, and suggests a path forward for Amazon's ambitions that could have a pretty big impact on the PC games market overall. The company's actions with regard to gaming in the past half-decade or so have been confusing, to say the least - there's always been a strong sense that Amazon feels like it should be doing something related to games (hence the existence of Amazon Games in the first place), but since the acquisition of Twitch in 2014, it's never seemed like a priority for the company's management and where its gaming strategy was actually leading has been very unclear. One key thing that's included in the data, though, is of particular interest to anyone who's been trying to divine what exactly Amazon's strategy in the games sector might be. All the same, whatever anyone's views may be of Twitch, Amazon, or Jeff Bezos and his phallic spaceships, the amount of private information that is included in the leaked files (notably income numbers for Twitch streamers, who have been caught in the crossfire of whatever issue the leakers have with Amazon) makes the whole thing very hard to justify. Thus far, the absolute worst-case scenario for this leak doesn't seem to have happened - while a large amount of private data has been revealed, users' security doesn't seem to have been directly compromised. Maybe New World ends up being a huge hit, but even if it fizzles out, Twitch will still be pulling in gigantic audiences day after day That's a big deal for the division, whose previous major efforts haven't even made it to the starting line - the most recent no-show being Crucible, which was cancelled outright after a poor reaction to its beta launch last year.įor executives in Amazon's gaming arm, however, any sense of jubilation at the strong response to New World has likely been forgotten in the week's subsequent events, as an enormous security breach saw the leak of tens of gigabytes of code and data related to the company's games division and its game streaming subsidiary, Twitch. The launch of its MMORPG title New World looked like its first genuine shot at a hit title, with enormous interest in the game resulting in overloaded servers and long queues for players - not a great look for the world's leading provider of cloud services, perhaps, but a positive sign for the game's future. ![]() It's been a rollercoaster few weeks for Amazon Games.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |