We saw yesterday that Amazon opened a new department for indie games with a huge launch sale and a ton of bundles by indie developers. Just hosting digital content and throwing crazy sales is enough to invite comparisons to Steam, but Amazon's marketing manager of digital video games, Tony Valcarcel, took to reddit yesterday afternoon and made the challenge explicit.
“Let me be 100% clear on this,” he wrote, “we want to sell every functional Indie game available on the market and are building new processes and self service tools to make this even easier in the coming months.”
Compare this stance to Steam's process for bringing indie games on board, Steam Greenlight . Instead of paying a fee and hoping to catch the eye of the voting masses, indie developers will simply email Amazon and get the process started. There's less of an eye toward quality control here and more of a push to be the one place on the internet where gamers can buy absolutely everything.
All competition is good for gamers, and having a retailer with Amazon's reputation is great for developers. Take advantage of the first salvo in the price war by picking up FTL for $4.99 ($10 on Steam ), Hotline Miami for $5 ($9.99 on Steam ), or Chivalry for $12.49 ($25 on Steam ). Get six games from Double Fine for $10.
Thanks to PCGamesN for the tip on the reddit thread.
