In what has to be considered the era of ‘Whatever you can do, I can do better’ from the amount of people entering the gaming console industry. We now have Amazon, potentially, throwing their hat into the ring. A well connected source within Amazon approached GameInformer with the news of this console being developed internally at Amazon, Here’s what the source revealed to GameInformer.
Amazon will be leveraging the titles already available on its platform. Each day, the company offers one productivity or game app for free and stocks a healthy library for its own devices, like the Kindle Fire. The console will also have its own, dedicated controller.
Other rumors believe that Amazon’s gaming console will sport a Qualcomm MPQ chip, commonly used in smart TV’s and set-top box devices, and will be available sometime before Black Friday. So I guess the real question is; whether this new device is real, and what it mean’s for the games industry.
If this device turns out to be real, the impact it will have on the industry will be minimal at best. What I’m saying may seem harsh. Especially for a device that no one has laid eyes on, or even seen the technical specifications for. But based off the past few iterations of gaming consoles released to market (Ouya and OnLive) the market is just too heavily dominated by Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony.
And to be fair to OnLive it was a game streaming service, which is slightly different from the Ouya, but it’s main goal was to deliver the games of today for a more affordable price. It had a unit and its own brand of controller. To the average person it is a gaming machine. And that’s the market that Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft are aiming for.
Amazon did release a statement after the post made by GameInformer, stating “They do not comment on rumors and speculation”. So I guess we’ll all have to wait and see if Amazon will be entering the games industry sometime around Black Friday of 2013.
Source: GameInformer, Tech Crunch
