Electronic commerce giant Amazon is looking to make a serious move into the video game industry, having announced that its gaming division will soon commence work onto an ambitious PC title.
No details of what this entails exactly have emerged apart from a sponsored job announcement on game website Gamasutra. The announcement comes with 26 job postings spanning almost all areas of PC game development: from senior gameplay engineers and a lead visual effects artist to level designers and 3D environment artists. It also specifies that the current team is made of developers who worked on various successful games such as Portal, BioShock, World of Warcraft, Half Life 2, The Last of Us, Shadow of Mordor or Halo.
One of the first things mentioned in the job post is the team’s use of Twitch for video games. Twitch.tv is a popular video game streaming platform which was purchased by Amazon in 2014 in a deal worth $1 billion. In this case, it will be interesting to see how the team will choose to implement Twitch support in the upcoming game.
No title, gameplay, story or details related to the game have been announced, other than it will appear on PC. It is unclear though whether this means that the game will be a PC exclusive; no jobs for porting the game to consoles have been posted in the announcement. However, Amazon already owns a game development studio already as they purchased Double Helix in 2014, developers who have most noticeably worked on 2013 reboot of the Killer Instinct fighting game and on 2008’s Silent Hill: Homecoming.
The announcement leaves many questions unasked, such as if the team Amazon is referring to is its own Amazon Game Studios or Double Helix. Amazon Game Studios have developed several titles for the iOS and Facebook games since it was founded in 2012, but has never took upon a project as ambitious as a full-fledged PC game. Along the years, Amazon have hired notable developers such as Kim Swift from the Portal team and Clint Hocking of Far Cry 2 and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. Amazon also hired Erik Nylund, a former writer for the Halo series, in 2013.
Whatever the ultimate result, the e-commerce giant’s foray into the video game’s industry shows once more that the latter has become one of the fastest growing and most profitable entertainment affairs in the last couple of years.
Image Source: The Next Digit
