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 Games 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 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. Now it may be getting an extra boost with the rise of cloud-based, streamed media services, and devices like the Kindle Fire (and perhaps, even, an Amazon smartphone) on which to consume it. The move to cloud-based gaming is something that is happening everywhere at the moment: Sony’s purchase of Gaikai and questions about what might happen with OnLive are also part of that trend.
