With each passing quarter, Amazon looks to become a more ominous presence in the online world. To enhance its standing across several industries, the goliath of a company has continued to add new services to its Amazon Prime subscription. What started as free delivery for its central eCommerce operations has expanded to include music, video, eBooks, and gaming.

In 2014, Amazon purchased the popular video game streaming platform Twitch for $970 million in cash. In 2016, they created Twitch Prime, which included some free content and a subscription to the primary Twitch platform. Now, following the launch and recall of Amazon Game Studios’ first major title, the company looks to realign itself in the rapidly-growing gaming space by tying Twitch closer to the central Prime offering.

Amazon unveils rebranding to Prime Gaming

The Prime brand is a colossus. To make it more appealing and bring more people to the Amazon online shopping platform, the company has infused photo storage, movie and series streaming, music, and now a game streaming service. Twitch Prime has officially been rebranded as Prime Gaming in an attempt to make the Amazon brand a bigger name in the massive industry.

Now, Prime members, of whom there are over 150 million, can also get straight access to free games, free game content, and all of the streaming content that came with Twitch Prime but as a part of their existing Prime subscription. It has been shown that Prime members spend much more on the retail site than non-members. So, attempting to reach the millions of PC gamers makes as much sense for the retail side as it does for trying to enhance the company’s stake in the gaming industry.

The Prime Gaming strategy is a winner

Amazon is primarily targeting the PC platform for its foray into the industry, with its two announced headline titles being a team-based shooter on PC and an open-world MMO on PC. While those games aren’t available right now, the newly-infused Prime Gaming gets Amazon’s foot in the door much more publically than merely being the owner of Twitch.

To potentially grow a gamer user-base while the fully-fledged titles are being developed, Prime Gaming is following in the footsteps of other popular PC platforms by infusing free games. It comes with several free games, including Blazing Chrome and Shaq Fu: A Legend Reborn, as well as further perks like extra content and loot in massively popular games, like League of Legends, Grand Theft Auto Online, and FIFA 20. Almost all other PC gaming platforms offer free games to people who join the platform and even a lot of the time when they don’t because it allows gamers to engage with the brand easily.



Some of Steam’s biggest games are free-to-play, with DOTA 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive headlining their selection. The Epic Games Store, Steam’s direct competitor, posts new free games bi-monthly, on top of ever-free games like Fortnite and Dauntless. Online casino gaming platform Vegas Slots Online offers over 7,500 of its titles for free, including Zeus and The Dark Knight Rises, which has proven to be a popular option. GOG is also a famous advocate of offering free games on its platform, with a bunch of classics from decades past complementing the likes of GWENT.

The switch to Prime Gaming should help to infuse Amazon as a brand in gaming, and potentially get more people into gaming via their existing Prime subscriptions. In the meantime, their game developers will work on getting them a more active and successful jump into the industry.

Amazon Game Studios still working on new titles

Amazon Game Studios has published many games over the last ten years, including The Grand Tour Game in 2019 for consoles, but the company’s heralded charge in was Crucible. Having launched on May 20 for PC, the company’s big-budget thrust into the scene didn’t pan-out. Labeled ‘dull’ by critics, at the end of June, Amazon unconventionally pulled the game back and put it into a closed beta. The free-to-play game is still being worked on by the development team, Relentless Studios, but the rare move to completely pull the game from circulation wasn’t the start that Amazon’s investing party would have wanted.



Now, Crucible is being worked on by Relentless Studios behind closed doors, and another major PC game is on the way in 2021. With a release date of May 25 next year, New World is another big-budget title, this time taking the form of an MMORPG in a mid-1600s setting. On a smaller scale, while infusing their Twitch capabilities, Amazon will also be launching Pac-Man Live Studio soon, in which players can game in co-op and create their own Pac-Man mazes.

Amazon’s highly-touted move into gaming didn’t go as planned, but infusing Prime Gaming into the Prime subscription looks to be the smart play while their big hitters move towards release.