Amazon Games – Game off!

I think Amazon wants to be the tools, not the talent.

• Amazon is ceasing development of one of its in-house games and delaying another following a disastrous launch but I think this was always a learning experience to enable it to become the biggest destination for developers to develop their games.
• Crucible is one of Amazon’s big-budget massive multiplayer online (MMO) games which was launched in March after a lengthy development period.
• Crucible launched in May 2020 and it fared very badly attracting a deluge of negative reviews that were so bad that the game was put back into invite-only beta in July.
• Crucible development has now been ended which follows on from Breakaway (another MMO) which was cancelled in 2019.
• Amazon’s game division was formed in 2012 and so far, very little has been produced which would have sent any of the independents into bankruptcy.
• This clearly indicates that Amazon is not very good at developing games, but I have long believed that this is not its long-term intent.
• I think what Amazon is really after is to become the place where other developers create their games like Unity and Unreal Engine.
• This is because while all the headlines have been about developing in house games, its M&A in gaming has been quite different.
• Amazon has assembled a series of assets such as GameSparks, Lumberyard, Twitch and AWS which have the potential to offer game developers a one-stop-shop place to develop all aspects of their games.
• I think that this is of much greater interest to Amazon as it will help keep AWS growing which is a far steadier and much lower risk business.
• Amazon takes an experimental approach to much of what it does and I think developing in house games was both an experiment and a learning curve to work out what it takes to have a good environment for games development.
• Clearly, the in-house games have been a disaster, but I suspect that Amazon has learned a lot about developing games which it has been applying to its development product.
• Hence, I suspect that Amazon is not going to launch any games at all and that New World (which has been delayed) will also end up being cancelled.
• This leaves Amazon Game Studios as a place to develop games which if successful is likely to become a division of AWS.
• Although it will be competing with Unity and Unreal Engine, I suspect its real target is the 40% of games which use neither of these platforms but do it all in-house.
• This is becoming increasingly difficult and expensive and Amazon is using its usual attractive price and high-quality tactics to entice these developers.
• Its early days but this line of attack has a much greater chance of success than developing games in-house.