Another game day for Amazon. Today the company is launching Game Connect, a new platform for cloud gaming that will see the company add a new selection of massively multiplayer online and free games to its catalog. It is also opening the Game Connect platform to developers for them to integrate their games with Amazon’s existing game accounts. Launch titles include Battlestar Galactica, World of Tanks, Pandora Saga, Stronghold Kingdoms and Super Monday Night Combat. The news comes just one day after the company announced GameCircle APIs to enhance the gaming experience on its Kindle Fire tablets.
The integration with developers will mean that the games can automatically link up with customers’ Amazon game accounts for the purchase of virtual goods and other in-game purchases, for example to reach new levels or playing subscriptions.
Meanwhile, to incentivize consumers to get and use those Amazon games accounts, Amazon is also offering them exclusive content and other deals when they play these games using those accounts. The accounts, Amazon says, can be created right at the product page.
As with the Kindle Fire GameCircle announcement yesterday, today’s news is about Amazon increasing its activities in digital content beyond films and books, and it looks like this may just be the tip of the iceberg for developments in Amazon’s Digital Games Store — which has been around since 2010 and now has 3,000 titles.
“Game Connect helps game developers reach more customers, move more quickly and grow their business by simplifying the purchase process for customers,” said Mike Frazzini, director, Amazon Games, in a statment. “This is an exciting next step for the Digital Games Store and we have even more to come.”
The growth may be in part to capitalize on a wider trend around cloud-based, streamed media services. These have been spurred on in part by devices like the Kindle Fire as well as smartphones (and perhaps, even, an Amazon smartphone), which often lack the on-device storage needed to run these games.
The move to cloud-based gaming is something that is happening everywhere at the moment: Sony’s purchase of Gaikai for $380 million is also part of that trend.