Amazon has acquired cloud-based gaming platform company GameSparks for an undisclosed amount in a move to help developers create games in a live setting, among other services. GameSparks announced that it is officially joining Amazon and will be working to further expand the services for game developers moving forward. As part of the deal, Amazon will be providing a wide variety of cloud-based services built by GameSparks to game developers and publishers in various areas such as multiplayer, live game operations, meta-game and economies, infrastructure, and core platform-as-a-service.
GameSparks has a broad scope of supported platforms, which include MacOS, Windows, Xbox, Steam, and many more. It is also built on multiple platforms such as Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services. Combined with Amazon’s own resources, GameSparks will be offering solutions designed to help developers build features including leaderboards, chat rooms, tournaments, currencies, virtual goods, achievement system, and matchmaking. The platform will also allow developers to design control panels for each team member and create custom application programming interface and server logic using its Platform-as-a-Service layer. Further to that, GameSparks not only helps developers build a full suite of gaming features, it also lets them create a deeper player engagement through access to player history and summaries and a cross-channel communication feature, among other things.
As part of the Amazon product team, GameSparks will be showcased at the company’s booth at the Game Developers Conference set to be held from March 13 to 23 in San Francisco, where the online giant is also set to demonstrate other services for game developers. In addition to GameSparks, other Amazon services will be on site as well including Twitch, Amazon GameLift, Lumberyard, Amazon Alexa, Amazon Web Services, and Amazon App Store. It is perhaps worth mentioning that Lumberyard is a cross-platform game engine acquired by Amazon in 2016 meant to enable developers to build games for Amazon’s platforms. It is more centered toward game development than generating profit. Additionally, Amazon bought Twitch a few years ago, beating Google’s YouTube to the deal. The addition of GameSparks to the Amazon cloud ecosystem further widens the company’s portfolio in terms of what it can offer to the game development community as a whole, expanding their selection of tools and solutions to produce powerful gaming experience for enthusiasts.