Social game companies have been enduring plenty of negative press lately, but where the critics see a saturated marketplace,
Amazon sees an opportunity. Today it launched Amazon Game Studios, which appears to be a direct competitor to the likes of
Zynga. The new team, which has apparently been working in secret for awhile, also announced its first game for
Facebook.
Living Classics, as the game is called, involves reuniting a family of foxes in scenes from classic stories. It's hard to say whether the animated scenes are going to attract masses of players in the coming weeks, but the game, which is free to play, has clearly been given a lot of thought by Amazon's new games team. And all the elements of popular social games are there, including rewards, the ability to share game elements with other palyers, and the sense that you're building something.
If your first thought was, "Hey, are they hiring?" The answer is yes. Check out the
blog post for the email address.
Joshua Gulick
Josh cut his teeth (and hands) on his first PC upgrade in 2000 and was instantly hooked on all things tech. He took a degree in English and tech writing with him to
Computer Power User Magazine and spent years reviewing high-end workstations and gaming systems, processors, motherboards, memory and video cards. His enthusiasm for PC hardware also made him a natural fit for covering the burgeoning modding community, and he wrote
CPU’s “Mad Reader Mod” cover stories from the series’ inception until becoming the publication editor for
Smart Computing Magazine. A few years ago, he returned to his first love, reviewing smoking-hot PCs and components, for
HotHardware. When he’s not agonizing over benchmark scores, Josh is either running (very slowly) or spending time with family.
