Amazon’s Gaming Service Could Arrive Next Year and Offer Twitch Integration

Earlier this year, a report from The Information came to light and shockingly revealed that Amazon was at the time working on a game streaming service, something many Amazon fans didn’t see coming for the companies future. Though it was very early days at that time, the report suggested that the company was already in talks with big publishers to make the idea a reality – and fast.

Now, a brand new report from CNET says things are moving forward on the project, with Amazon planning to announce the service at some point next year (2020).

The report also reveals that Amazon’s AWS cloud service will be powering it, and that the company plans to integrate it with Twitch much in the same way Google said Stadia will take advantage of YouTube for some unique experiences.

The company has been hiring for a “new initiative” in its Amazon Web Services team (AWS underpins many cloud-based services you use every day) that, according to CNET’s sources, is involved with the new gaming service. One job posting found by CNET apparently says that Amazon plans to integrate the service with Twitch, which sounds similar to Google’s eventual plans for integrating Stadia and YouTube.

Publication, The Verge also recently found a job listing that’s up right now for a “Principal Product Leader” for a “New AWS Gaming Initiative.” The listing doesn’t reveal any details about what the service might look like, but it does contain information to suggest that there’s a pretty bold statement about Amazon’s gaming ambitions.

The statement read:

“We believe the evolution that began with arcade communities a quarter at a time, growing to the live streams and e-sports of today, will continue to a future where everyone is a gamer and every gamer can create, compete, collaborate and connect with others at massive scales.”

Amazon also owns Twitch, a live-streaming platform that a lot of folks use to stream live videos of themselves playing games; apparently, there are masses of people who enjoy watching another person play a game, rather than pick up a controller and play it themselves.

As such, Amazon has the technology to set up a game streaming service. It just needs to ensure it has developers onboard and a good set of games to launch with.

That being said, Google has a lot of cloud experience and plenty of chops in the gaming world, albeit in the mobile games arena, and its Stadia service hasn’t exactly had a rip-roaring launch or received many glowing reviews thus far. While game streaming is known to have a pretty tricky battle with bandwidth, lag and compute resources, just to name a few, so it’s also worth noting that Stadia is in its fledgeling stages and has scope to improve quite a bit for its consumers.

Not much is known about how Amazon intends to approach game streaming, or whether these efforts will bear fruit, at least at this time. However, the company spent years building up internal game development teams on projects which could be assisting in the progression of the release. Even though, some of which got cancelled and many of those developers were later laid off. But there’s no doubt Amazon is serious about butting heads with Microsoft, Sony and Google. “The odds of them letting the Xbox Scarlett and PS5 launch without Amazon being there is zero,” said Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter.