It's a brave new world where there is no offline gameplay. >=DNew World is the one I'm most interested in but I wish it wasn't an MMO.
This is also troubling.
Maybe I missed something at some point, but do we know the DRM for Amazon's games? Will these be available on Steam?
Oh, I know that. I just thought it was funny is all. I mean, there's even experienced devs like Carbine who ended up with the flop that was WildStar. It's a crazy difficult genre to get into, because it's incredibly expensive to do right, and Amazon's going for it right out of the gate.
I haven't actually been following this close enough. Who'd they manage to get onto the dev team for this MMO?
Yeah I understand. MMO's have long been the death knell of many upcoming studios (especially the likes of the Amalur mmo).
Though I do think The New World is off to the right start, going for a sandbox style world that allows players to play different styles of play, rather then trying (yet again) to chase the tired and old WoW style themepark style of mmo that most of the failed mmo's have been made after.
Taken at face value that's an amazing premise. Let's see what they do with it.Essentially it's an open world sandbox MMO where you colonize 17th century North America, but the twist here is that all the supernatural stuff people from the era believed is actually true.
Me too. Hero Rocket League is more interesting though.I was expecting a Hero Shooter, not a Hero Rocket League!
So Crucible is essentially Hunger Games?
They will get all their twitch partners to play these games for a while. If the games are not dogshit they will get big.
?
Amazon does everything lol
Everything
Good question. Unfortunate lack of a Prime app on my Apple TV leads me to believe they're confident enough to launch these games exclusively through Amazon. Which would be unfortunate.
Are you sure? Amazon has a lot of customers, and Twitch has a massive reach.Unfortunate...? That would be financial suicide!
Surely they can't be that stupid!
Unfortunate...? That would be financial suicide!
Surely they can't be that stupid!
The games were basically what I expected from them when I heard they were making PC exclusives.
They will get all their twitch partners to play these games for a while. If the games are not dogshit they will get big.
Awesome multiplayer room at the new Double Helix/Lumberyard studio. Raised floor for crazy amounts of cabling.
Are you sure? Amazon has a lot of customers, and Twitch has a massive reach.
I don't think they need any third party distribution platform.
I'll play it if it's free with Prime. Not paying full price for online-only again.
"Prior to the acquisition when we were independent, the kernel of this team was the team that built Killer Instinct for Microsoft for Xbox One, and when we released that game it was surreal to send the build off and have it be posted and literally within hours people online are broadcasting the game, talking about the game, talking about what they loved about it, what they didn't like about it, where they hoped it went and their love of the Killer Instinct franchise. And that just made a gigantic impression on this team because it's like everything you got into game development for but times a hundred because the satisfaction is so immediate and the feedback loop is so immediate," he said.
"So we actually came into Amazon with this deep passion for broadcasting, with multiple broadcasters on the team, deep passion for community, deep passion for that type of engagement with customers - and that community-driven strategy was really shaped at Amazon partially based on the passion that studio members from Double Helix had for that type of development. It's hard to develop with those types of communities - they're hardcore gamers and they're the most passionate fans, but when you get it right it's just incredibly satisfying.
Gilmore noted that Amazon's community-driven approach means that players will get access to games much, much earlier than is typical with AAA titles. "The plan for Breakaway is immediately following TwitchCon we're going to go into our alpha and we're going to be very deliberate about that, letting people in as we know the game will support them - make sure we know they're having a great experience," he noted.
"You can expect that we'll release our games to customers earlier than most developers would but then we have this long tail commitment to continue to refine them. Whether that fits the specific definition of AAA or not, I think from a quality standpoint absolutely we stand toe-to-toe with the absolute best games out there in every respect. But in terms of how you might associate a specific rollout plan or release strategy with the definition of AAA I think we're trying to be disruptive and do something different that involves customers earlier in the process."
"As you look at the progress of great, big AAA games, whether it's a Battlefield or GTA or Call of Duty, as those games scale and become businesses in and of themselves, innovation becomes a bigger and bigger risk because your customers are demanding in a lot of ways more of the same and it becomes really, really hard to create something that's genuinely new, and that's part of our mandate to make things that don't exist in a familiar template," he said.
"And we see that as a huge opportunity, and it's a big part of the reason why we're focused on what we call community-driven games for the lifestyle gamer or core gamer - it is leaning into those communities and making big investments to do things that are disruptive and new where we see a lot of people in the industry kind of locked into this sequel mentality or this franchise service oriented mentality. We are trying to do brand new things. You're right that the investment always has to be appropriate, and there's a dimension to that but I feel that Amazon is making the biggest bets on the new of anyone in the games space."
The fact that Amazon's newest titles are built for the PC isn't necessarily a retreat from mobile. Gilmore said it's partially due to the DNA of his original Double Helix team, but "we're building businesses with these games and where they go from there, I think the sky is the limit."
Amazon Game Studios seems to be just getting started. One look at the company's jobs page shows that it's hiring aggressively, and Gilmore confirmed, "We are growing really, really rapidly. We're about 120 developers just on the studio side right now, spread across those two teams but then connected to well over 200 people on the Lumberyard team and a swathe of developers on the AGS Live and platform services team. There's a ton of people invested in games here."
Same ;(All multiplayer. Not interested
Crucible seems like its gonna be the most popular, especially if you can fuck with the players like in DungeonLand.
Still wish Amazon didnt buy Double Helix because i doubt theyre gonna produce a hit.
That's a good point actually - do we know who's developing these games? Is Double Helix behind any of them?