Amazon is going to release premium mobile games

The American retailer plans to release a number of paid high-budget games for Fire OS. We are looking into why paid when talking about the mobile market is perhaps not so bad, unlike the greedy look towards console games.

For three years in a row I have been writing about the fact that free-2-play won. Shareware games earn fantastic amounts, hundreds of millions of people play them, they form a special attitude to the content among the masses. There is no point in arguing with this or lamenting about it, this is a given that the majority accepts. 

At the same time, the niche of paid games still lives on. These games do not earn tens of millions of dollars, but there is still a place for them, in the prosperous future of which the fact that this year’s mobile games, according to Apple, have become paid Threes allows us to believe! and Monument Valley.

Amazon is also working in this direction. At least, these thoughts are suggested by an article that recently appeared on The Verge. In a nutshell, it’s about the plans of the American retailer to teach users to pay for game content again. At the moment, the company is preparing to publish within its Android platform several premium projects developed by teams that previously specialized in console products.

Mike Frazzini”We decided that if we build a situation in which users can purchase a game and then just play it, give him such a pre-experience, we will be able to close the existing niche,” said Mike Frazzini, vice president of Amazon Game Studios. 

But these words should hardly be taken too seriously. The fact is that the initiative was launched two years ago, when Amazon launched the second generation Kindle Fire, and the company wanted to adopt the console practice, in which, as a rule, software sells hardware.  

During this time, the mobile market has changed significantly. And, as I see it, today the company is just trying to adjust to a new possible trend. She has no other way out – she has three games in development without microtransactions (plus, one was released a month ago – Tales From Deep Space), which were created for exclusive distribution within Fire OS. 

The problem is that they will not help the sales of the Fire Phone or the new Kindle Fire and are unlikely to be able to pay off themselves, given the scope with which they are being developed: Amazon developers chose those who previously worked only on console games: WayForward (Shantae, Bloodrayne Betrayal, Duck Tales Remeated, etc.), Frontier Developments (Elite: Dangerous, LostWinds, Kinectimals, etc.) and Human Head (Rune, Dead Man’s Hand, Prey, Minimum, etc.).

And here I see the main problem. The current premium hits (which include the Earn to Die series, the Room series, the Five Nights at Freddy’s series, the Kingdom Rush series, Valiant Hearts, Hitman GO, “Bum”, etc.) are not about the fact that “we are as beautiful as on consoles and with the same gameplay.” They are about a unique gameplay that is ideally suited for touch devices. They are comfortable, understandable, interesting, and, with rare exceptions, attractive.

Earn to DieTheir niche, in some way, is a space for experiments, in which it is also very difficult to get to the top without a feature, a high-profile brand, popularity on flash sites, a viralka that unexpectedly worked thanks to the media, and so on and so forth.

And, probably, the mentioned “very difficult” is akin to “almost impossible”. Moreover, success here does not provide millions of downloads and the same amount of dollars. 

But at the same time, they are not so aggressively buying up traffic, there is a more honest competition here – for your wallet. Therefore, I admit, it’s a little easier for diamonds, even not cut, here. 

Returning to Amazon: for the mobile industry, in general, the “look, we have it like on consoles” stage is, it seems to me, passed (although some developers for some reason continue to release beautiful MOBA on smartphones and tablets), but the American company is still looking in that direction. Perhaps because of the presence of its own Android console, ambitions, hopes that one of the games will take and shoot. But this is akin to the expectations of small teams, expectations that are met once in a million, if not less often.

Plus, even if one of the retailer’s games shows itself perfectly, the Amazon Appstore is not the platform where you can become a hit.