Gaming

Amazon to challenge Stadia and xCloud with new cloud gaming service


Crucible was meant to have been released at the end of March but the coronavirus caused it to be delayed (Pic: Amazon)

Amazon aims to make a big splash in the gaming industry with its own cloud gaming service, titled Project Tempo.

Cloud gaming still feels like it’s in its infancy, but companies clearly still see it as the future of gaming. Both Google and Microsoft have embraced it with their respective Stadia and Project xCloud platforms, the latter of which is still in the preview stage and the former kind of becoming the Internet’s punching bag.

Now, Amazon is planning on getting in on the action with its own cloud gaming service. There had been rumours of Amazon setting up a streaming service last year, but a report from the New York Times outright confirms it.

Dubbed Project Tempo, there’s currently no scheduled release date for the service. Amazon does already have a games studio though, which has been making original titles since 2010, although none of them have been particularly big names.

Probably the most recognisable game Amazon put out was the tie-in to its Amazon Prime series The Grand Tour, which was decent but starved of content.

No doubt Amazon has its hopes pinned on its two upcoming titles to become widely popular: New World, a massively multiplayer online role-player set in the 17th century which will receive a closed beta later this month, and Crucible, a multiplayer shooter scheduled to release next month.

The plan is to most likely to try and win over an audience with these titles, before enticing them to the exclusive games it will make available on Project Tempo.

Amazon also has plans to create interactive games designed for Twitch, which it owns, that will allow streamers and viewers to all collectively take part.

‘We love this idea that you have a player, a streamer and a viewer all sharing in this synchronous interactive environment of Twitch,’ said Mike Frazzini, Amazon’s vice president for game services and studios.

After years of interest in gaming, Amazon is now investing hundreds of millions of dollars into its own games and services, just as Sony and Microsoft prepare to launch their next gen consoles.

However, cloud gaming has yet to become the de facto method for playing games and you only have to look at how routinely criticised Google Stadia has been to know it’s not easy winning audiences over.

Part of the reason Stadia is currently struggling is due to how its versions of console and PC titles always seem to be inferior, such as Doom Eternal, which cannot run at a 4K resolution despite pre-releases saying otherwise.

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