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Mike Frazzini is one of Amazon’s most experienced local gaming executives, having been with the company for 16 years and working on games at Amazon since 2009. Now Vice President of Games, Frazzini is one of the best people around. bill. how one of the world’s largest technology companies will participate in the industry.
Frazzini spoke about Amazon’s approach to making games at our recent GamesBeat Summit 2020 event. Many know that Amazon offers cloud services and other tools for game developers through its app store, Amazon Web Services infrastructure, and the Lumberyard game engine. For years, such mobile games and services were everything Amazon did in gaming. But now the company is making its own games, and it’s doing it the Amazon way.
“Every time we approach a new business or industry, the first thing we do is ask ourselves who the customer is,” said Frazzini. “You ask,‘ What is their current situation, what are they struggling with, what are their needs, how could we surprise and delight them with something we can build? “
In other words, it’s as much a data-centric as it is a human-focused approach, where the voices of gamers and streamers and their audiences count as much as the creativity of the developers themselves.
Frazzini added: “In games, from the beginning, we thought of game developers as clients and players as clients. The first thing you should do is go out and meet as many as you can. When I introduced myself, we already had a video game business with Amazon Web Services. The game developers were using it. “
Twitch purchase
Above: TwitchCon 2019 drew thousands of people to San José, California.
Image credit: Dean Takahashi
Things became more focused in 2014, when Amazon acquired Twitch for $ 970 million. This showed people that Amazon was serious about gaming, and then Amazon put together a list of ideal candidates to hire for its gaming business. Now, the wisdom of that acquisition is clear, as Twitch is growing rapidly during the pandemic as people view live streaming of games as a form of entertainment.
Amazon recruited people like Louis Castle, John Smedley, Rich Hilleman, Christoph Hartmann, and many others to run various projects and studios. The company has game studios in Seattle, San Diego, Orange County in Southern California, and San Francisco. It also works with other developers around the world.
The gaming leaders Amazon hired knew how to make games, but at Amazon, the approach began with “working backwards on documents” or describing the experience the player should have, based on the feedback gathered. Frazzini said Amazon even shows those documents to players to see if they sound good to them. Once it feels solid, teams start designing a game and writing the software to make it all work. Some things change along the way. And some ideas don’t, like Breakaway, an esports game that was archived in 2018 after a couple of years of development.
“Making games was something completely new to us, and in part we applied some of the same methods that we use at many Amazon,” he said. “You hire great people, the best in the industry, and then you give them the freedom to create and invent. It’s not taking the Amazon playbook and applying it to games. He’s taking the Amazon playbook, applying the parts that make the most sense, and then learning and adapting it to create content. “
As an example, the retail business focuses on fast shipping. You can measure that and improve it. With games, you try to create an engaging experience. The metric for fun is not simple. Then there is more exploration. That’s a big part of the exercise, and Frazzini said it is an “incredible learning experience” and that games are a “fascinating category.”
“Creating content is an important next step for us,” said Frazzini.
Launch games
Games that are close to the finish line are the massive multiplayer online fantasy title New World, which has a supernatural view of the colonial era; and Crucible, a science fiction survival adventure. Crucible will launch on May 20 and New World is slated for August.
Both games focus on live content, where developers continue to add content over time.
“From day one, at launch, we expect it to delight a lot of people and play it for a long time,” said Frazzini.
I asked him if Amazon was considering making mobile games that it could launch every six months. Frazzini said the mission to “surprise and delight” and “invent on behalf of customers” led the company to focus on borders. One of them was Twitch, or live streaming of games, and Amazon will “skew” towards games that work well on Twitch, Frazzini said.
“Those games are typically multi-year games,” said Frazzini. “We see it as a border. It is not known, but there are enough signs to trust that there is something interesting here. There will be a lot of experimentation. You will get some things right and some things wrong. You iterate and fervently experiment on this border. You come up with ideas and you notice things that you can duplicate ”.
Working during the pandemic
Above: the corrupt in the new world
Image credit: Amazon
When asked about the impact of the coronavirus at Amazon Game Studios, Frazzini said that safety was paramount. The teams found that not everyone had the right equipment at home, and Amazon had to take them away. He noted that making games is an iterative process in which people give their opinion by looking over the shoulders of someone who creates something. Teams can no longer do that.
“That slowed things down, and it definitely created a challenge for the teams,” said Frazzini. “There’s definitely a (productivity) hit we’ve taken.”
But the notion of “playing apart together” is inspiring, as games are bringing people together during the pandemic, he said.
“People are turning to games as a form of entertainment and a way to stay connected,” added Frazzini. “There is some inspiration that comes from that. Of course, it is not worth the cost. These are terrifying and troublesome times. “
But developers are motivated to do their job so that players can enjoy them, even if they’re blocked. Frazzini said he believes more people will end up playing, as family members have a better idea of how attractive the games are while locked up with no other things to do. And for Twitch, that means both games and non-games are likely to take off.
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