Today at GDC, Amazon have announced the launch of GameOn, an API for backend services for game developers similar to Microsoft’s recently announced Azure Game Cloud service. One interesting new feature of GameOn however is the ability to offer real world rewards in your game, that will be issued from Amazon.com. It will be interesting to see how well that service matches meshes with various gambling laws.
Details of GameOn from the GameOn homepage:
What is Amazon GameOn?
GameOn is a set of flexible APIs built on AWS cloud infrastructure and works on any operating system, giving you the ability to scale quickly, while allowing you to invest more time in what you do best—designing great games. With GameOn you have an easy tool to bring more players in on the action—allowing them to compete for real-world prizes fulfilled by Amazon or other in-game rewards. Drive engagement and increase monetization of your games by adding leaderboards, leagues, and multi-round competitions to your games, or strengthen your fanbase by allowing players and streamers to create their own user-generated competitions.
Obviously pricing is going to be a big factor in GameOn adoption. This is why Amazon is making GameOn free until May the 1st, 2018. For a limited time you get 35,000 free plays per day, then get charged $0.003 per play. The devil is in the details there in terms of what a “play” is. If that’s per game, it could become outrageously expensive extremely quick. If it’s per user per day the price is more reasonable but could still quickly rack up. Clearly this will only work with games that monetize on a per play basis as opposed to traditional pay once and done pricing models. You can learn more about pricing and sign up for a developer key here.