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Amazon just announced a new gaming experience for developers and the Kindle Fire: GameCircle.
According to the Amazon Mobile App Distribution blog, GameCircle is a “new set of services designed to make it easier for you to create more engaging gaming experiences and grow your business on Kindle Fire,” by making “achievements, leaderboards and sync APIs accessible, simple and quick for you to integrate, and will give gamers a more seamless and entertaining in-game experience.”
Amazon offers a growing suite of developer services. Its new GameCircle is geared specifically for game developers too, which is great news for the Kindle Fire since it is facing a firestorm of Android-based content competition from the new Nexus 7. Game Circle also helps players to better experience their games through three key features —achievements, leaderboards, and sync—that will surely continue to entice folks to the dominating Android-based eReader.
Achievements allow players to “track all earned trophies, treasures, badges, awards, and more without leaving the gaming experience,” while leaderboards give an “in-game view of score comparison information and percentile ranking, allowing players to quickly and easily check standings against top players or competitors, without ever leaving your game.”
Sync autosaves players’ in-game progress to the cloud for immediate pick-up exactly where they ended when switching devices or restoring a deleted game. Losing progress, scores or achievements is not a problem with GameCircle, because as all data is safely stored in the cloud.
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“Our goal is to give developers great tools to quickly and easily reach new customers and keep them engaged. That’s why we’re creating easy-to-integrate APIs for features like leaderboards, achievements and sync. We also introduced In-App Purchasing API in April, allowing developers to offer a seamless 1-Click purchasing experience within their apps and games, and we’re just getting started,” said Vice President of Apps, Games, and Services at Amazon Paul Ryder, according to the announcing blog post.
“GameCircle gives developers the right tools to build an immersive, more entertaining experience on Kindle Fire, which will ultimately help developers grow their business,” Ryder added.
Amazon’s new gaming experience clearly draws cues from Apple’s Game Center, which is an online multiplayer social gaming network. It launched in 2010 to allow iOS app users the ability to invite friends, start multiplayer games, track achievements, and compare scores on a leaderboard.
Google was looking to develop a similar system for Android, according to reports in May, but it looks like Amazon beat the gurus in Mountain View to the punch. The launch of GameCircle is timely due to rumors of a Kindle Fire 2 launch allegedly set for this summer.
GameCircle is now available for games on the Kindle Fire, while developers can sign up for access to GameCircle APIs at Amazon.com/gamecircle-signup.
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