Amazon Gaming Ambitions Include Original Title In May, Cloud Platform

Gaming is huge business and the COVID-19 situation has boosted that even further. Even without the coronavirus, however, analysts have predicted that the gaming industry revenue this year will be double the recording and box office markets combined. As such, it's really no surprise that almost anyone and everyone wants a piece of that pie. And, of course, Amazon is setting out to conquer that market as well in more ways than one.

That Amazon has plans to expand its empire beyond retailing games made by others is really no secret. It has gobbled up game development studios and experts and even created its own somewhat controversial game engine. It even started its own Amazon Game Studios. The full extent of its plans, however, has only come to light recently.

The New York Times reports the e-commerce giant's plans to finally launch its first original game, the sci-fi shooter Crucible, no later than next month. This is a separate venture from the company's earlier announced New World, an ambitious and partly criticized

MMO set in the 17th century. That could also launch in May.

And then there's Project Tempo, a cloud gaming platform designed to rival Google Stadia and Microsoft Project xCloud but with a twist. Rather than simply streaming a game, it could tie in with Amazon-owned Twitch video streaming and allow broadcasters and their viewers to play with each other.

Beyond those, Amazon has other businesses and products that will greatly benefit from this aggressive gaming push. It will be selling or licensing tools like the Lumberyard game engine and cloud services from AWS to other game development houses. And, of course, these games will be one of many gateways to introduce consumers to the rest of Amazon's retail and entertainment empire. Whether it succeeds in this already cutthroat industry is probably already known considering how the company has so easily planted its foot down in others.