Building games as an indie or AAA studio is serious business. Join the Amazon Appstore and AWS during our GDC developer day event on March 15^th, 2016 as we teach you everything from game ideation, creation, scaling, monetization, marketing, polishing and publishing. We have an incredible line up of speakers, including Amazon evangelists and industry thought leaders from Twitch, Backflip Studios, Yacht Club Games and King. Come get practical advice and best practices on how to scale the business side of your game development. The developer day is part of the official GDC programming, so if you are attending GDC make sure to come out and check out the full list of talks we’ll be giving. Click here to register.

From a One Person Shop to Indie Dev to AAA: What It Really Takes to Grow

10:00am-11:00am

We've entered a golden age of creativity and experimentation. Today, anyone with an idea can build a game and publish it to a global audience.  How does the gifted amateur become a pro game developer, and from there, a games industry success story? Hint: it requires more than just programming or artistic talent. In this session, we'll show you how to approach game development as a business - even if business isn't your "thing." We'll look at the single most-important skill you can develop, and show by example what happens if you neglect it. We'll also offer practical insights on choosing a game genre, development environment, and target hardware as well as how to monetize your game.

Want a great chance to show your game to the media and indie game community? Well, you’re in luck because it so happens we can make that happen. We have 4 slots available in The MIX 2016, and we’re looking for the next indie game that will get people talking. The 5^th MIX showcase is happening March 14^th from 7pm till late at the IGN headquarters, 625 2^nd Street in San Francisco.  

What do you have to do to get in on this you ask? Easy, send your game to me. Okay, there’s a little more to it than that but not much. Submit your game and be ready to demo it on an Amazon device like the Fire tablet or Fire TV. For more details, including how to submit your game for consideration, read on. 

In Dev Chat – Short Answers to Big Questions, our new video series of short videos created by Amazon Appstore, developers of successful apps and games answer your questions in less than 90 seconds.

In this edition, the team behind Zattoo explains how they approach app design for the living room experience, and how building a native app with a single codebase for both mobile and TV has been advantageous for them. They also discuss how they are using Login with Amazon and Amazon’s in-app purchasing to drive registrations and monetisation. All this has driven their results on Fire devices to surpass their expectations. Zattoo distributes live television and catch up services through the Internet to connected devices. Thanks to its rapid penetration in Germany, Switzerland, and other European countries, it is now the largest Internet TV provider in Europe.

Amazon Underground allows developers to monetize 100% of the customers using their apps or games. Because apps and games are Actually Free on Underground, including in-app purchases, all customers need to do is download and start playing. Developers are paid by Amazon for every single minute their app is used by customers—rewarding player engagement and retention, rather than monetization effectiveness.

In Dev Chat – Short Answers to Big Questions, our new video series of short videos created by Amazon Appstore, developers of successful apps and games answer your questions in less than 90 seconds.

In this edition, the team behind NeuroNation explains how their focus on the customer experience has fostered increased user engagement. They also discuss how they monetize globally by adapting their business model to the way their users connect and behave, and how they see Amazon Underground as a unique opportunity to align monetization with their high user engagement.

In Dev Chat – Short Answers to Big Questions, our new video series of short videos created by Amazon Appstore, developers of successful apps and games answer your questions in less than 90 seconds.

From the Big Screen to the Living Room

In this edition of Dev Chat, Philip Mordecai from Curzon reveals why Amazon Fire TV provided the ideal platform to deliver its premium content into the heart of the living room. Many traditional businesses are launching digital units as they navigate a world where customers are engaging with content in new ways, whether it be online, mobile, or through connected devices in their homes.  Curzon, an 80- year old cinema chain based in the UK is no different.  Since late 2010 the company began operating its video on demand service – Curzon Home Cinema which delivers a highly curated selection of films direct to connected devices. “We tactically chose this route because we believe that consumers want to watch when they want and how they want and that choice should be open in a legal way,” commented Phil Mordecai.

In honor of the launch of UKTV Play on Fire TV this week, we invited Oliver Davies, Head of Digital Products for UKTV, to share his team’s experience developing the video on demand app.  UKTV is a multi-award winning media company that reaches over 42 million viewers every month through innovative TV channels such as Dave, Gold and Drama.

Fire TV and the Amazon Ecosystem

We’re all really excited about our video on demand app UKTV Play launching on Amazon Fire TV. It’s a great device that’s easy to use, puts a huge range of content and services at users’ fingertips and retails at a very keen price. I’m sure that it will be a big success and will only enhance our range of apps now and into the future. It’ll also be fascinating to see how the Amazon ecosystem will evolve and how the range of consumer devices will work together to offer an ever more joined up and frictionless experience for users in different environments. I’m particularly interested in the notion of anticipatory design that aim to answer questions users haven’t yet thought of asking, and I’m sure that new ways of interaction with technology exemplified by Amazon Echo will facilitate ever richer experiences for users.

This post was originally published by Nate Trost on Gamasutra and republished here with permission.

There are no cave paintings warning of poor arcade conversions to the Atari 2600, but from a historical perspective there might as well be. Platform conversions have existed since the dawn of personal computers and gaming console systems. Whether a popular Apple game ‘ported’ to Atari or Commodore, or an arcade hit translated to the first gaming consoles, conversions have always been a part of the gaming industry. Some things haven’t changed from those early days; good conversions excite and delight players happy to have a popular game available on their chosen hardware. Poor conversions evoke a particular deep brand of distain. Decades later, the Atari 2600 port of Pac Man is still a poster child for the concept of a ‘shoddy port’. Nobody wants one of those!

They are coming to your platform, and they want 60 FPS!

At Trihedron, we have a long and extensive history of platform conversions, so it was an exciting opportunity to partner with Amazon and Yacht Club Games to bring Yacht Club’s critically acclaimed Shovel Knight to the new Amazon Fire TV. In many cases it can be a struggle to create a faithful adaptation of a game on a new system, whether due to technical challenges from hardware limitations or from trying to modernize an older legacy game on a new platform, enhancing without losing the original charm. There are plenty of conversion retrospectives which focus on detailing these issues, and exploring how various knotty problems were overcome. Shovel Knight was not one of those conversions! Instead, we will look at the factors that made Shovel Knight for Amazon Fire TV a relatively smooth conversion and why the desired end result was achieved without fountains of blood, sweat and tears. That Shovel Knight fit nicely on Amazon Fire TV wasn’t a happy accident, but rather a combination of solid technical foundations and being pointed at powerful hardware that fit the envelope of already optimized code.

In Dev Chat – Short Answers to Big Questions, our new video series of short videos created by Amazon Appstore, developers of successful apps and games answer your questions in less than 90 seconds.

In this edition, the people behind Ministry of Sound explain how they leveraged Amazon’s digital and physical distribution opportunities to monetize across business units and provide valuable insights into the process of developing an app for Fire TV.

Ministry of Sound is a global media and entertainment company with an impressive range of interrelated business units. In addition to their famed London club featuring dance and house music, Ministry of Sound combines one of the world’s largest independent labels with a tour and events business, a digital radio and video streaming presence and an apparel business.  Amazon facilitates sales of both physical and digital services for Ministry of Sound, meaning that they can sell physical copies of albums as well as promote their radio app all with one partner. 

The launch of Amazon Underground was front and center this week, and we’ve seen a lot of excitement about apps and games that are #ActuallyFree. Amazon Underground customers will find 100% free versions of popular premium titles like Office Suite Professional 8 and Fruit Ninja and popular titles with in-app purchases like Frozen Free Fall, Star Wars Rebels: Recon Missions, Angry Birds Slingshot Stella, and many more.

Tom’s Guide wanted to see what all the fuss was about, so they tried out the Amazon Underground game Jetpack Joyride, and says “The real magic comes in the form of free in-app purchases” and “There is no limit on the number of in-app purchases you can make, and you can buy items repeatedly, depending on whether the app allows it. That’s a huge perk.” Some developers wonder: what’s the catch? There is no catch. An article on TechCrunch hits this home when it notes, “…the “actually free” program isn’t a one-off promotion and that the company is committed to this program.”

OK, so now you’re wondering: why is Amazon doing this? In an article on CNBC, mobile Analyst Jack Kent says, “By paying for the apps, Amazon is showing that the app store's role is part of a bigger strategy to drive users into its ecosystem”. Developers like Amazon Underground too. Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal, Co-Founder and CEO of Games2Win says, “I believe Amazon Underground is a massive game changer for the Casual Gaming Business…” and then notes that Amazon Underground “…validates that 'time spent' is the most 'scalable, relevant and indexable' metric to reward mobile games consumption.”

VentureBeat thinks this is good for developers too, noting, “If the new model takes off, it could provide an interesting path to revenues for companies that are struggling with microtransactions in the free-to-play business model, where players can get a game or app for free and then pay for in-app items.”. We agree. One of the most important objectives of this program is to help developers make more money.

Check out all the articles below.

Join our live Twitch broadcast on Tuesday Aug 25 7:00am PDT as we talk with Michael Molinari founder of Studio Bean and Choice Chamber. Choice Chamber is a real-time, crowdsourced, procedurally generated game where your fate is in everyone else's hands. We can’t wait to get Michael’s thoughts on game design in general, what it means to be social, and taking advantage of Twitch as a new channel for building community around your game.

As always, we’ll also force our guest to weigh in on our Twitch concept game, Planet Destroyer. After hearing the spiel and seeing a demo, we’ll ask him to give it to us straight: we want the unvarnished truth, her honest opinion of the idea and how we should realize it.

The Amazon Cloud Drive API provides a RESTful interface, and Android and iOS SDKs, for upload, download, manipulation, and organization of data in the cloud. You can use this API to integrate these services in your app and offer added flexibility to your users. Your app can provide direct access to their Cloud Drive storage and the content they keep there, as well as use it to preserve game settings, preferences, and other application state on their behalf. By doing this you can also add Unlimited Storage benefits to your app through Amazon Cloud Drive’s Unlimited Photos and Unlimited Everything storage plans.

Many app developers have already integrated support for Cloud Drive into their web, desktop and mobile products, including odrive. odrive helps Amazon Cloud Drive customers automatically sync folders on their desktop with their cloud storage account. We had a chance to sit down with Alex Teu, EVP for Partnerships, to discuss his company’s experience with supporting Amazon Cloud Drive in their product. 

Dev Chat – Short Answers to Big Questions, is a series of short videos created by Amazon Appstore in which developers of successful apps and games answer your questions in no more than 90 seconds.

In this edition, the creators of the Digital Concert Hall share their challenges and experiences in transferring the live experience of a classical concert to viewers based in New York, Berlin or Tokyo by using AWS and Fire TV.

On Thurday’s installment of our live dev show we welcome University of Southern California’s Sam Roberts, Assistant Director and Gordon Bellamy, Visiting Scholar. We’ll be discussing game design, game entreprenuerism and their game development program. We’ll also have a no holds barred critique of our concept game “Planet Destroyer"

Please join the conversation on Thursday July 23 at 11:00 am PDT at http://www.twitch.tv/paulcutsinger. 

For background, we’ve been talking a lot about how to get more game developers over the app poverty line and sharing best practices for building quality games and healthy businesses on the blog and at conferences.

Now, we’re doing something a bit different. 

After working on classic Nintendo franchises like Metroid Prime and Donkey Kong Country, Rhys Lewis made the jump from AAA to indie development earlier this year with the release of Star Drift. Combining slick shooter gameplay with intuitive one-touch controls, Star Drift quickly became a fan favorite when it debuted on iOS in February. Not long after, Lewis brought the game to Fire TV and in the process created a stellar example of how developers can adapt a touch screen game for a big-screen living room experience.