Dubai: Amazon has entered the social online gaming market to cash in on the growing popularity among its customers and has found people spend a great deal of time on social networking platforms.
The e-commerce retailer announced its entry into the arena with the creation of Amazon Game Studios that will be focusing on making games that are innovative, fun and well crafted.
The studio introduced its first game, the literary-themed Living Classics, which debuted on Facebook on Monday.
Living Classics is a casual literature-themed puzzle that targets adults and younger Facebook users alike.
Social gaming is currently a field dominated by fast-rising Zynga, the creator of the popular Ville games such as Farmville and Words With Friends.
Producing social games will serve Amazon’s Kindle tablet efforts, for example, in the same way that self-publishing affordable e-books achieves that goal.
“We know that many Amazon customers enjoy playing games — including free-to-play social games — and thanks to Amazon’s know-how, we believe we can deliver a great, accessible gaming experience that gamers and our customers can play at any time,” the company said on its blog post.
Amazon has reached out to gamers on social media, with a Facebook fan page that currently has a little more than 150 likes.
According to P.J. McNealy, a media consultant at Digital World Research: “Amazon is entering the social gaming market to complement its Kindle Fire tablet computer and a new smartphone it reportedly is working on.”
He said the e-commerce retailer controls the shopping experience on computers and tablets, and they want to control it on mobiles too. Having games is a “nice bonus”.
Analysts and social gaming experts though do not yet see Zynga’s demise with Amazon’s entrance into game-making although Amazon can become a good rival if it can convince its large network of customers to support its games as well. Kindle users can also be targeted as potential customers for Amazon’s games in the future.
