Sometimes Amazon fails.
The world of video games has so far resisted the ambitions of Jeff Bezos' group.
His attempts to create his own big budget games have led to failures.
Breakaway
development
was discontinued in 2018. In 2020,
Crucible
was taken off sale after a month on the market, a rare move.
His online role-playing game project based on the
Lord of the Rings
universe
had to be abandoned this spring because of a disagreement with the Chinese group Tencent.
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Suffice to say that the release this Tuesday of the online game
New World
is seen as the last chance for Amazon Game Studios to make a name for itself.
“
New World has to be our flagship game, without a doubt.
If only for the morale of our teams
”, recognizes in the New York Times Christoph Hartmann, vice-president of Amazon Games.
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The stars seem a little better aligned this time around.
This ambitious open-world online game, sold for 40 euros, was rather well received by players during its testing phases.
This Tuesday,
New World
was the most watched game on Twitch (a video platform owned by Amazon), far ahead of
Apex Legends
or
Fortnite
.
To grab the attention of viewers, a number of influencers won download codes for the game, courtesy of Amazon.
A showcase for AWS Game Tech
The design of
New World
has been hectic and its release has been postponed several times. “
You have to release a game when it's really ready,
” argues Christoph Hartmann. Amazon did not go easy when it came to the challenge of designing its own video games. He did not buy any development studios and preferred to create them from scratch - a choice shared by Google, which ended up closing the doors of its Stadia Games Studios.
The creative teams are also forced to use the technical tools of the American giant, such as the Lumberyard game engine, rather than opting for the most popular solutions on the market.
New World
thus has the heavy task of being the technological showcase for Amazon and its AWS Game Tech offering.
Relying on the AWS cloud, Game Tech is a solution used by Epic Games for its
Fortnite
game
.
In
New World
, the computing power of AWS will allow players to participate in battles with hundreds of other people, but also to see the surrounding world for up to four kilometers around.
Amazon promises other technical feats.
"
Almost everything in New World is calculated on servers in the cloud, rather than on the player's computer
," explains Richard Lawrence, director of Amazon studios, in Venture Beats.
$ 500 million annual budget
The American giant has opened four studios in Seattle, San Diego, Orange County, and recently in Montreal, where it has hired many Ubisoft developers. In addition to the original creations in the making, Amazon has launched a publisher activity. In 2022, he will publish the popular Korean role-playing game
Lost Ark
in the West
, which had never been translated until then. He also signed a publishing contract with the new British studio Glowmade, created by industry veterans.
Could a
New World
failure
call this strategy into question?
The new boss of the group, Andy Jassy, was reassuring.
“
Some activities are immediately successful, others take years.
I think we can be successful in video games if we hang on,
”he wrote to his troops in February.
According to Bloomberg, Amazon injects $ 500 million a year into its video game business.
An amount that does not include its Twitch subsidiary, nor its Luna cloud gaming platform.