Amazon has the opportunity, but does it have the army or the desire to win the gaming war?
The PocketGamer.biz Mobile Mavens is our panel of experts drawn from all sectors of the mobile gaming industry.
Like a massive glacier, Amazon is a slow-moving wall of ice that's rolling down from the high hill of ecommerce towards the ever-restless ocean of gaming.
So, this week we asked our Mavens - Can the Amazon tortoise win the race?
Or, more specifically
Does anyone care about Amazon as a platform for games, and does it have any chance of competing with Apple and Google etc?
Scott Foe
In Amazon, we are discussing an entity whose own market capitalization rivals the value of the global games business.
If Amazon silos its gaming efforts, holding those efforts accountable to its own profit & loss structures and organizational processes and practices, providing sufficient investment within those silos, the outstanding question becomes...
"Is there talent enough to drive that engine?"
You go to war with the army you have:
"Hey, Amazon, where your army at?"
Harry Holmwood
They're absolutely a credible player to be taken seriously. They own the eBook space already and pretty much own online shopping for physical goods.
I would guess more games are running on their cloud than anyone else's. I _think_ the Kindle Fire is the bestselling Android tablet already where it's sold (I read it was 59 percent market share in USA).
Increasingly, though, it seems like it's starting to matter less and less who's hardware you're running on.
The whole idea of a 'platform' for games is becoming a bit redundant, as pretty much all games will end up on all platforms with any significant installed base, and the tools to facilitate that are great.
Oscar Clark
Amazon have surprised me that they haven't done more in this space yet.
They essentially already have the credit card details for anyone who used the internet to buy anything and yet they haven't been as aggressive about building their commercial reach as I would have expected.
Why does this confuse me?
I suspect that their commitment to the physical retail business means that they see this [gaming] as a secondary (or even tertiary) market. They can reap the benefits of smart devices for their Lovefilm/Kindle markets and off set the risks of the demise of physical book retail.
But as Harry has said more games services use their EC2 infrastructure than any other. Arguably their cloud service approach is the biggest world-changing transition that Amazon have contributed.
Amazon's force multipler
Amazon do have completion in this area, but are quietly holding a prime brand position in terms of scale and trust. As the next-gen consoles continue their transition to cloud services, Amazon's reach and potential as a gaming platform will become just a little more obvious.
Perhaps the real question is whether Apple and Google ready for that fight when it comes?
You can read what PocketGamer.biz editor-at-large Jon Jordan thinks about Amazon in the opinion piece: Unconsoled or not, Amazon's momentum in the games market remains relentless.
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