Amazon Launches Game Studios, Hopes To Dominate Social Gaming

Amazon on Monday rolled out Amazon Game Studios, a new social gaming platform aimed directly at online gaming competitor Zynga.

The new gaming platform was announced in a blog post for which the world’s largest online e-tailer said:

“We know that many Amazon customers enjoy playing games — including free-to-play social games — and thanks to Amazon’s know-how, we believe we can deliver a great, accessible gaming experience that gamers and our customers can play at any time,” the post said.

The first major release on the platform is titled Living Classics in which foxes find colorful animated scenes from their favorite books and players much help them find moving objects. Books include Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, and King Arthur among others. It seems rather fitting that a company that started out selling books would incorporate them into their first foray into social gaming.

Much like Zynga games, Living Classics features social options including friending and sharing rewards that have been earned.

Amazon allows gamer to play Living Classics on their own platform or through Facebook here.

The next goal for Amazon is to attract developers to the platform in order to grow its presence.

Here’s a video showcasing the Living Legends title:

[iframe src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/Ml-jlpds90o” width=”560? height=”315?]

Amazon plans to greatly increase the number of games it offers to users in the coming months.

In the meantime, user reactions on the official YouTube page for the Living Classics game range from indifference to excitement, which means the Amazon Game Studios platform could be a huge success or a monumental failure.