Just recently Amazon has been on a big hiring spree. This is mainly with a focus on finding staff for Amazon Game Studios, which currently has on offer over 100 different positions on the Amazon job’s website. For the online giant, the decision to get some video game action was not purely about getting a slice of that $100 billion game industry. It was also largely about getting developers on board who need cloud storage for connecting players in their multiplayer games.
Statistics show that in 2016 Americans spent more time on average on a mobile game than they did on streaming video services like Netflix. So, Amazon decided to get in on the action and created its own game engine called Amazon Lumberyard. This game engine allows game designers to create their games already integrated with Twitch for live game broadcasts and Amazon Web Services (AWS) for cloud hosting. Amazon Game Studios has also been developing games on Lumberyard as a way of self-promoting what it can do.
The package is attractive to developers because of it, as is, allows a new game to capture an established audience right out of the bag. And with Amazon seeing the gaming industry as becoming the next largest form of entertainment, it only stands to reason that they’ll be investing heavily in this area. Prime members are already beginning to see these changes and in September 2016 Twitch Prime was launched – a premium service for Twitch users but free for Amazon Prime members. Prime members can now download free game content and watch ad-free streaming on Twitch as part of their package.
Amazon purchased Twitch back in 2014 for $970 million, and it’s now becoming clear why that was. Not only does it give users a great game-streaming experience, but it gives AWS a competitive advantage as cloud-storage demand increases. It’s estimated that nearly 385 million people will be involved in e-sports by the end of 2017 and 500 million by 2020. Already Twitch has more than 100 million users with nearly 10 million of those being daily users. The video game industry will keep expanding and is estimated to be worth around $132 billion by 2021, which is an increase of over $30 billion from now. And with Twitch now under Amazon’s belt, the company is set to take a big piece of the action. Watch this space!
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