back to article Gamers! Yes, gamers – they'll rescue our streaming Fire TV box, hopes Amazon

Amazon is hoping to crack the streaming media market with a new gaming app that lets you play many of the latest titles for $6.99 a month. GameFly Streaming is available today as an app on the retail giant's Fire TV and lets you rent bundles of games at a time. For example, the "Action Pack" contains seven titles including F.E …

  1. Lee D Silver badge

    OnLive Mark 2.

    What, precisely, changed between then and now? I understand Amazon have a shed-ton of spare server capacity so that covers their server costs (I doubt they are putting GPUs into all of them, however), but what about the latency, quality, dependency on a third-party, renting model, etc. concerns that killed OnLive?

    Renting and streaming games works great for... well... no-one. Casual gamers will suffer the latency but not the ongoing cost, and more experienced gamers will happily pay twice as much but won't suffer the latency one bit. Who's it aimed at?

    If you threw it in with Amazon Prime, still it would be only casual gamers playing and they won't spend much at all so you won't make money on it. If you charge separately, you have to work out cheaper than buying the game and "owning" forever, and the cost of potentially losing the whole account if you go through a rough-patch and can't afford the monthly fee.

    I don't see the target audience.

    1. Voland's right hand Silver badge

      What changed - the network

      OnLive was forced to try dedicated deals with ISPs, Amazon is not.

      OnLive as an OTT service was too small to get the latency right. Also in those days 5MBit (the OnLive req) to consumer required dedicated arrangements on a lot of SPs.

      Amazon is big enough and has sufficient peering presence not to have the first problem. The average access loop bandwidth has also increased to a point where the per sub bandwidth is no longer an issue.

      1. Paul Shirley

        Re: What changed - the network

        Amazons server farms are still too far from the endpoints for low latency and it's unlikely they're equipped with suitable hardware for even casual gaming. Building out more distributed server infrastructure runs counter to their current concentration in datacentres but Amazon could afford it.

        My personal belief is the shear crapness of the Onlive experience was only part of why it failed, the market it worked best on (mobile) just wasn't interested in more than native gaming. Actual gamers didn't accept the performance. If you overlook the rented aspect, the passes were pretty good value, yet few bought in.

        I'm struggling to see this as a sales driver. More of nice freebie that most will ignore, while passively consuming video.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "I don't see the target audience."

      A persistent problem with Amazon products and services, that they don't seem to understand the market, and they're usually late too it as well. Certainly as a general mechandise retailer they're good (although the ongoing slow death of free delivery increasingly makes other vendors more competitive). But when they tried selling tablets they wanted you to pay for a not-full-fat Android device that fired advertising at you, and they came to the market late. With Amazon Prime they want to bundle up a whole load of stuff into what is a fairly expensive bundle that doesn't have broad appeal unless you'd pay the full price anyway for one of the components (and again, for many of the parts others offered this before Amazon did).

      And with this latest one we see much the same - a so-so offer for the mass market that doesn't really appeal to any obvious segment, and they're so late to the gaming party you have to wonder if they think gaming is just about hosting the original Wolfenstein. I wonder if they've heard of Steam?

    3. streaky

      Renting and streaming games works great for... well... no-one

      I'm not so sure this is true, it kinda makes sense in the console space, in the PC gaming space it makes no sense at all though.

  2. dogged

    how frigging much?!?

    PlayStation Now's package is either $19.99 a month for access to all games or $6.99 a week for one.

    Fuck right off, Sony.

  3. Bob H

    Amazon website says not available in the UK due to geographic restrictions?

  4. James Hughes 1

    Fire stick

    Accidentally got Amazon Prime the other day by pressing the wrong button when buying something. But tried it out on the PS3, and really quite like it. So bought a Fire Stick as Ps3 needs to be repaired (coincidence?), and, also, really like that too (but did work on the chip in it so biased). Been struggling getting the other half to stop watching stuff. Not tried other media streaming services though, so comparison not available!

  5. searssem

    game rentals at sears canada

    something interesting is that sears is comtempalting a game rental service like this at http://www.sears.ca/

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