Amazon Showcases Twitch With a Massive Free Videogame (latimes.com)

An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: "Amazon.com's first big-budget video game is like street basketball, except played in a mythological world where athletes are armed," reports the Los Angeles Times, adding "Wait, Amazon makes video games?" Indeed. Two weeks ago Amazon Game Studios held their first live "unboxing event", and PlayBreakaway.com is now accepting sign-ups for alpha playtesting of their new Twitch-optimized team-based title, promising a game "made by streamers, for streamers." ("Taunt every interception, celebrate every kill, and highlight your dominance with instant replays...")

"If you think about what makes games so fantastic, it's the experiences you have with your friends," explained one Amazon Games official, in an interview with the Times Friday. "A long time ago it was in arcades, then over local networks, then online and now you have Twitch and e-sports and modding and cosplay. They are all about shared experiences."

Comments

Old school

[Jon Peterson]

"Taunt every interception, celebrate every kill, and highlight your dominance with instant replays"

Yeah, because that's what games are all about. Amazon has seen the future of gaming and it's a 15 year old brat playing counterstrike, forever.

Re:Old school

[vux984]

Its far worse than that, twitch isn't about the enjoyment of playing games, twitch is about being seen playing the games.

Twitch is to gaming, what instagram is to dining.

I, personally, have no interest in twitch and rarely watch other people play games for any reason; i'd rather play than watch. So I have the same disdain for watching other people play games that I have for watching sports on TV. I could not care less.

That said, I know lots of people watch sports for fun, and I'm not surprised lots of people now watch others play video games for fun. Whatever floats your boat.

I expect though, that games literally designed to be steamed via twitch, will generally be as shit as those "free2play/pay2win games designed to extract as much money as possible from microtransactions. Because in both cases they didn't set out to make a great GAME, they set out to subvert the game to other goals.

F2P games have shit timesinks and grinding and deliberately missing content in order to try and sell you shortcuts to the less shitty parts of the 'game'.

Likewise, I expect games designed ground up for twitch will compromise the integrity of the game in service to ""Taunt every interception, celebrate every kill, and highlight your dominance with instant replays" -- like a restaurant that has no atmosphere because the lighting is set up to make instagram photos looks better rather than foster an intimate dining experience...

Re:Old school

[Oligonicella]

F2P games have shit timesinks and grinding and deliberately missing content in order to try and sell you shortcuts to the less shitty parts of the 'game'.

And how do you suggest they make money so they can keep the game going?

Games

[ledow]

"If you think about what makes games so fantastic, it's the experiences you have with your friends,"

Er... not really.

I mean, sometimes. I can remember a handful of really fun sessions on games across LANs (using everything from 10Base2 to Gigabit, and serial, and even - at one point - IP over daisy-chained parallel cables using a DOS-based packet driver).

But usually on games that, from the point of their release until several months later when we could organise a session, were only played on single computers by one person. And the vast majority of games that I love are inherently single-player.

And though I run multiplayer servers for a number of games, and a few of them are incredibly popular in that little niche game, the multiplayer experience is there because the game demands it, and then because I can't stand playing with the majority of morons that exist online today. I honestly cannot play online any more without a KICK/BAN button that I can guarantee will work without the democracy of opening it up to a vote. And, yes, even with that kind of dictatorship admin, I still run extremely popular servers.

The latest one for me is Factorio. Love the game. It's fantastic and sucks time like all those games of old that I used to play but had to give up when real-life intervened.

It's multiplayer. It's online multiplayer. I have a server for it. Myself and a random guy spent three hours setting up a factory. Then another guy joined. 20 minutes later, I found missing pieces of transport systems and entire buildings destroyed, and then the new guy started attacking us both. By the time I kicked him, the game was ruined.

Even amongst friends, the problem is not that it's not possible - multiplayer over the Internet is easier than ever. It's that friends don't have the time, money, inclination, or play in ways that make it fun to play with them. My brother is a gamer, I can't remember the last time we played together. I think it was when AOE2 was remastered on Steam, because it worked and we'd always played that with each other.

Some of it is age, but when you go play with younger people who are "into games", their attention span is incredibly limited, they piss about not playing the game half the time, there's no semblance of teamwork or organisation and I "ragequit" (as they say - I mean, they have a specific phrase for "we're so shit that we make other people mad and not want to play with us"!).

That's why I run my own servers.

That's why - unless it's casual games at a party - I don't bother to try to play even with people on my Steam friends list.

That's why I very much prefer games that don't require that kind of interaction and are playable in their own right - not by having friends on the same service.

And even if you have a great set of friends and a lot of games and interests in common, and all the facilities in the world - the number of times you can play in a game against or (more difficult) with a significant number of your own friends, for any significant amount of time is truly limited.

Hell, I'm a CS-player from since before 1.6, and some of my best gaming moments were had in things like TIS-1000, Flight Control, and Master of Orion (the original) than anything else. And rarely were my friends crowded around the PC going "Oh, wow" at them (because nobody has any need to crowd round a PC like that any more).

The best gaming moments ever are things like playing Half-life 2 for the first time. Or getting through Syndicate to that impossible last mission. Very rarely do they involve other people, and certainly not playing against random strangers.

I've just cut TF2 out of my life, after years of casual play on it. Everything became "serious" and competitive, and that's not what the game is about. So everyone ends up peeing about and ruining the game to get some relief from even the "casual" server setups that are no fun at all.