Stefan Kaltenberger is heading the Amazon Appstore in Germany. His Business Development and Marketing teams located in Berlin and Munich are working together with local apps and game developers to drive customer and revenue growth.
At this years’ GDC in San Francisco, Amazon announced GameOn, a new service for game developers to build cross-platform competitions into their games and award prizes. Can you tell us more about the idea behind GameOn?
Developers have consistently told us they are looking for ways to increase engagement with players. We created Amazon GameOn to give developers a simple, yet powerful toolkit to help increase retention, foster community among players, and to take advantage of the momentum around competitive gaming and eSports. We believe community, the heart of competitive play, has the power to generate compelling content and drive engagement at scale. Developers have proven that community, competition, and content feed into each other producing some of the most engaging games ever.
What is the benefit for the developer to use GameOn?
Our flexible set of APIs allow developers to easily add organized competitions to games, and award in-game and physical prizes fulfilled by Amazon. GameOn currently supports leaderboards, leagues, and multi-round competitions giving developers the ability to run local and regional competitions with geolocation and player groupings. With our leaderboards, developers can organize a variety of competitive events from PvP leagues and multi-round eSports qualifiers for core games to daily high score challenges for casual games. Developers can also allow their users to organize their own friendly user-generated competitions
Since GameOn is an API it can be used fully cross-platform and works on mobile, console, TV or PC and does not lock developers into one OS, programming language, or device. It is built on AWS’s cloud infrastructure to make it easy for developers to quickly scale competitions.
Our pricing model for developers is $0.003 per play and we are offering the first 35K monthly plays free for the first six months.
You mentioned the possibility to reward players with physical prices, how does that work?
A unique value proposition we have for developers is real world prizing. Developers can choose their prize(s) and we are able to fulfill this directly on the backend creating a seamless experience for developers and players. This feature is currently available in the US. Subscribe to our GameOn Newsletter for news and feature announcements.
Is GameOn already used in games and can you talk about any results already?
GameOn is already being used by a variety of different developers including nWay, Mindstorm, Eden Games, and Game Insight. Eden Games for example increased their tournament retention in Gear.Club by 20% when including real world prices and Mindstorm saw an ARPDAU increase by 17% and an ARPPU increase by over 500%. Mindstorm told us that the increase is directly attributed to offering real-world prizes as rewards for tournaments and that they are alsoseeing our top players going at each other to win those tournaments.
Where can I find more information about GameOn?
Our Developer Portal holds all information around GameOn. It is also worth checking out our blog where we regularly publish articles or case studies with interesting data points around GameOn.
