Amazon's influence on gaming and their future in the gaming ecosystem

Amazon Games was founded in 2012 and since then, Amazon has been trying to break into the video game market. In the beginning of their campaign back in 2012, Amazon saw very little success in publishing their own original games. They work all in-house so their developers are specific to Amazon and are not in partnership with independent developers. The first AAA game they ever worked on was a game called Crucible. However, the game was received poorly and suffered from internal decision within the studio. They quickly shut down the project and left it behind, never to be released as a full game.

Amazon Games reached their big break in the gaming space with the release of Lost Ark. Lost Ark was released in 2019 and is a free-to-play action role-playing game and had garnered a mountain of success for Amazon and has proved that they belong in the gaming ecosystem. Even now, the game is still successful as there are hundreds of thousands (100-400 thousand) of players every month. With it's mainstream audience, the game still receives updates and expansions that don't seem the be slowing down any time soon. The next update is scheduled to roll out the 10th of May with updates scheduled to come out each month.

To keep their hype train rolling, Amazon Games was to release another game that has garnered both critical and user success. That game is New World.

With the game releasing September 28t, 2021, it's still a fairly new game and continues to have it's dedicated fanbase. Like Lost Ark, New World is an mmo rpg except this time it comes with a full AAA price tag. However, the game didn't really live up to the success of it's free-to-play cousin, at least not as first. In the launch of the game players reported terrible optimization with the game including low frames and buggy textures. This wasn't the only complaint the game would see. An even bigger problem was the risk of physical damage to your pc hardware. More specifically, your graphics card. The biggest culprit to this was just down to resource management wit h the game. The game was simply using too much gpu power and didn't allocate resources else ware. This causes the gpu to use up more memory than needed. Most of the time your gpu does take the brunt of most technical blows when it comes to optimization. However, the cpu is still there to pick up the slack with handling things like interfaces, shadows, and on-screen effects. But for Lost Ark, everything was taxed on the gpu. This could eventually lead to physical damage from heat that the gpu creates if pushed to it's limit for long periods of time.

As people have learned later though, this was not problem that New World caused specifically. There are other instances of multiple EVGA gpus having faulty and cheap components from a specific manufacturing time. This did lead to an even bigger debate for games to be better optimized for vast levels and capabilities of hardware. You can read more about it here.

Amazon Games has certainly made a big first impression in their games, for better or for worse. This is just the beginning of their gaming legacy and I hope to see further expansion and diversity in the types of game they make.