MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
Amazon is reportedly working on its own game streaming service that may launch in time for Christmas 2020.
As reported by CNET, the retail giant has plans to announce the service next year and according to “two people familiar with the company’s plans”, it has already commenced hiring for the project, which is being described as a “new initiative” within its Amazon Web Services division.
“We believe the evolution that began with arcade communities a quarter at a time, growing to the live streams and e-sports of today, will continue to a future where everyone is a gamer and every gamer can create, compete, collaborate and connect with others at massive scales,” one job reportedly posted this month said, with at least one other job posting explaining the company wants to “drive innovative new use cases like machine vision and game streaming”.
“The odds of [Amazon] letting the Scarlett and PS5 launch without Amazon being there is zero,” Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter told CNET.
Rumours about an Amazon streaming service first surfaced earlier this year and it’s thought Amazon has already commenced talks with game publishers about distributing their titles through its service. If true, this sees Amazon join a string of companies already exploring game streaming, and ties in neatly with its new gaming service, GameOn, which allows developers to integrate cross-platform competitions including leaderboards and leagues into their games.
The news comes just days after Google acknowledged “an issue” resulted in the delay of the dissemination of invitation codes to early adopters of its own streaming service, Stadia, which officially launched this week. Though the issue has purportedly only affected “a small fraction” of preorders, a number of customers reported that despite ordering the Founders’ Edition when preorders went live, their orders have still not been shipped and they have yet to receive correspondence from Google inviting them to register their gamertag/nickname – even though this was widely advertised as a perk of the Founder’s Edition.
Just days before its launch, Google confirmed a number of key features originally detailed to early adopters of Google’s streaming subscription service will now be delayed. Further to a Reddit AMA with Google’s Andrey Doronichev and Beri Lee, it appears Stadia’s Founder’s Edition will now launch without achievement notifications, family share, or 4K streaming for PC. It’s also been confirmed that the much-publicised Buddy Pass – which enables players to gift access to a friend – will be delayed for approximately three months.
