In-house game developers on one team.
Professional gamers on the other.
The pregame report is under way, highlighting each player’s strengths and style on this Throwdown Thursday—with Twitch.tv all set to broadcast a live battle showcasing Amazon.com’s first foray into PC game development.
“Breakaway,” a sports brawler title that features an expanding roster of mythical warriors, was created and designed at the retail giant’s growing gaming studio on Technology Drive in the Irvine Spectrum.
Amazon Game Studios Orange County employs more than 260—a mix of designers, animators, programmers, engineers, production managers, and visual effects and audio specialists, as well as operations personnel and game support staff in marketing and community development.
The 56,000-square-foot, two-story building, which has remained under the radar since opening this year, is now nearly filled to capacity.
“We’ve grown faster than we expected,” said studio head Patrick Gilmore, who held the same role at Double Helix in 2014, when Amazon acquired the Irvine-based video game maker, providing a foundation to grow its local hub which includes two other buildings near Jamboree Road and the Santa Ana (5) Freeway.
The Irvine operation and a studio at headquarters in Seattle are the only outposts of Amazon’s sprawling global operations which are producing content for this latest gaming initiative.
Part of its OC operation has been put to work on Lumberyard, a free, 3-D engine for developers to create high-quality games, connect them to the cloud via Amazon Web Services, and engage fans through Twitch, the world’s largest live-streaming site for gaming content.
San Francisco-based Twitch, which attracts more than 100 million monthly viewers, was acquired by Amazon in 2014 for about $970 million.
Content
The latest action comes as Amazon continues to plow new ground with content ranging from sitcoms to documentaries. The company still generates most of its $107 billion in annual sales through online retail, but it now has Twitch and Amazon Web Services as market leaders in their respective segments of live-streaming and cloud computing services.
The Twitch stream of “Breakaway,” broadcast from the second-floor studio on Technology Drive, showcases Amazon’s dual-pronged strategy in real time.
The streaming not only grants more casual fans a backstage pass into the heavily guarded world of game developers and one of the world’s most influential technology companies. It also touts game play, competition, graphics and storylines along the way and invites AGS’s the expert gamers and most loyal customers to become part of the development process.
“The studio was basically built around the broadcast center,” Gilmore said.Â
The idea, which took more than two years to materialize, centers on bringing the customer as far into the development environment as possible.
It’s a delicate balancing act as the company strives to maintain confidentiality and protect closely held intellectual property while granting unprecedented access to game developers and engineers. Visiting participants must pass multiple security checkpoints and sign non disclosures before gaining even partial access to Amazon’s most secretive game development hangouts, such as the spot in the Irvine Spectrum.
“The studio was built around that concept,” Gilmore said.
Weekly game testers have been visiting the office for months and will likely continue through the New Year, as “Breakaway” will enter Alpha testing on Dec. 15.
Amazon is fixed on amassing smaller sets of test users who will have access to a few hours of game play per week as the company works out bugs and other iterations before the game is live 24 hours a day.
The video game carries some aspects of football with goal scoring, mixing in team-oriented strategy with individual offensive and defensive tactics, but carries standard brawler trademarks, such as special attacks and power enhancements.
Amazon hasn’t settled on a monetization strategy, but it appears the game will be free to play, though it could drum up revenue through in-game purchases, or possibly advertisements.
It’s a strategy that has worked well for Spectrum neighbor Blizzard Entertainment Inc., which has released two free-to-play hits in the last few years.
The collectible card game, “Hearthstone,” and the online brawler “Heroes of the Storm,” have amassed tens of millions of users, and like Blizzard’s first-person shooter, “Overwatch,” which was released in May, are staples in the booming competitive gaming segment.
Part eSports
Amazon’s “Breakaway” certainly carries tenets of an eSports game—strategy, teamwork, huge gaps in skill level, and traditional sports themes in game play.
“We built a game around those ideas, and it turned out a lot of those ideas that make a game fun to watch also make it really fun to play,” Gilmore said. “One of them is aspiring to be an eSports game.”
The next phase of tests will garner more feedback from players, identify potential monetization streams, and help structure the business model.
“Our attitude is we’re building a giant community with this game, and that’s what we want to lead with,” Gilmore said. “It’s not just enough to build something novel. We want to make a hit game.”
