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Comment by mcraiha | Hacker News Reader

Has Amazon provided anything useful to gaming space? They have bought lots of companies, but their track record in gaming space seems to be very poor.

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Their game studio published its first big game a couple of months ago called Crucible. It was not good... It basically just ripped off all of the bits of recent popular games without doing anything new.

They had an MMO called New World scheduled to launch this month but it was delayed until at least 2021.

Sounds like the AmazonBasics strategy.

Prior to this they released The Grand Tour Video Game, a tie in to their Prime Video series of the same name. It was also generally poorly received.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Tour_Game

They seem to be doing a great job running Twitch which brings in a lot of attention, marketing and revenue to the gaming industry. I'm not sure if any of this is Amazon's influence or just the Twitch folk continuing momentum but either way it still seems to be improving.

Twitch is fairly independent from Amazon and AWS.

and what is this if not an attempt to dilute the Twitch brand in favour of the more Amazon-oriented Prime umbrella?

I think Twitch Prime was never very close to Twitch from an organizational perspective. My read is this that this moves likely gives Twitch as an organization more autonomy.

They offer a Crytek derived game engine called Lumberyard used for the long-running Star Citizen scam

Their commercial games have all been flops. They do provide cloud infra for game servers as well, but I have no idea if that's useful or what adoption looks like

Well, AWS and scalability is incredibly useful for game launches; while Fall Guys might be a bad example, you can easily see where well-architected scalability would help. Being able to burst up to 100k+ concurrents at launch and then drop down to, say, 50k, or 20k, is a massive cost savings compared to buying (or leasing) capacity for 100k users and then having most of it sit idle.

I dislike AWS for most projects, since, without any sort of large-scale discount or negotiation, it's vastly more expensive than dedicated hardware, but if I were launching a game like Fall Guys I'd want to launch in AWS, and then migrate to dedicated hosting or hybrid-cloud once things are more even-keeled and you know what your usage patterns are like.

That said, that's not specific to AWS. I can get the same thing on Azure, Google Cloud, Tencent Cloud, etc.

$970 million[0] to Twitch and a storefront from which to buy games.

[0]https://kotaku.com/reports-amazon-to-buy-twitch-for-over-1-b...

They used to have "Kindle Underground" or whatever, for the Kindle Fire tablets, but they shut that down. Basically you'd get free upgrades to games and stuff at no cost. I used it to play games I'd have on Android for free without having to pay for upgrades. I also returned the same tablet two days later cause it had a dead pixel when I opened it.

Amazon Underground, and as a hobbyist game developer it's the most money I've made on a mobile platform. I was sad to see it go. I put the same game on Amazon, Play, and App stores, with the same (minimal) advertising, and underground was an order of magnitude more profitable.

Is that more profitable per user, or more profitable total?

How can you have either without the other?

$1 per 1000 users on a store that gets you 100 users pays more than $0.01 per 1000 users on a store that gets you 1000.

Right, I think I missed some implicit context here.

Easy. You get a publisher who takes a cut of the per-user profits but who promotes your game and gets you significantly more users, enough so that you end up making more total profit than you would have without the publisher.

I wouldn't call that 'profit', if it's before deducting an expense like that.

More profitable total. Took a lot more users to make the same profit as one sale on the app stores, but because it was free for the end user a lot more played it.

Something like a couple hundred paid on the stores, but over a hundred thousand played the underground version.

That's a shame, I wondered if it was just not profitable for Amazon's end, it sounded too good to be true. I remember the model was... the longer people play your games, the more you make... I guess they didn't think that one through? I don't like subscriptions for games, but a subscription for mobile games I might consider if it keeps the spyware off my phone. I usually opt to pay to remove ads from any games I play long enough. I'm sure I'm one of the rare few though.

Yeah I didn't understand how they planned to make it work long-term, but it was great while it lasted.

Free game engine, but not sure if it has significant users.

Everyone runs their servers on AWS. I say everyone, definitely Valve, and I'd assume quite a few other firms.

So there's that to start

Sony as well.

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