Amazon Makes Yet Another Attempt Into the Video Games Industry With ‘Prime Gaming’

Plotnick declined to say how many people had joined Twitch Prime; he said it was one of the fastest-growing parts of Amazon Prime. Gaming is one of the biggest global entertainment industries, with 2.7 billion people projected to play a game this year, according to gaming market researcher Newzoo. Growth has accelerated with the coronavirus pandemic forcing people to stay indoors and seek online entertainment, and gamers worldwide are expected to spend nearly $160 billion this year. Other large companies are also making inroads into gaming. Last year, Apple released a video game subscription service, Apple Arcade, and Google debuted a mobile gaming service, Stadia. This year, Facebook introduced a gaming app.

Amazon has been getting into games over the past few years, too. In 2014, it bought Twitch, which is used mostly to stream video games, for $970 million. But its most recent attempt to become a big player in gaming flopped. In May, Amazon introduced“Crucible,” which was a free-to-play multiplayer shooter game produced by a subsidiary of Amazon Game Studios. The game was years and millions of dollars in the making. Yet after a heavily promoted release, gamers did not bite. “Crucible’s” numbers quickly dropped off a cliff; about 10,000 people were playing the game at the same time when it was released, but it averaged only 361 simultaneous players in June, according to analytics site Steam Charts.

Amazon pulled “Crucible” from circulation last month, so no new players can join the game at the moment. Colin Johanson, “Crucible’s” top developer, said at the time that developers would take the opportunity to make changes to the game and “focus on providing the best possible experience for our players.” Piers Harding-Rolls, a research director at Ampere Analysis, an analytics firm in London, said it was rare for game makers to yank a game from circulation. He said “Crucible’s” failure was evidence that the video game industry is difficult to crack and that gamers are tough to please. “It illustrates that nothing is a done deal,” he said.

Kellen Browning c.2020 The New York Times Company