Amazon to Take On Apple's Game Center with GameCircle

[Akshay Masand]

Amazon recently launched on Wednesday flaunting a “new gaming experience for Kindle Fire” named GameCircle, which is a social network for games similar to that of Apple’s Game Center. The new GameCircle includes achievements, leaderboards and sync functionality for developers creating applications for the Kindle Fire tablet. Certain games have already been tested on the service such as Temple Run, Doodle Jump, and Triple Town.

According to Paul Ryder, vice president of Apps, Games, and Services at Amazon, the company’s “goal is to give developers great tools to quickly and easily reach new customers and keep them engaged. That’s why we’re creating easy to integrate APIs for features like leaderboards, achievements, and sync. We also introduced In-App Purchasing API in April, allowing developers to offer a seamless 1-Click purchasing experience within their app sand games, and we’re just getting started.” For those of you who are interested in learning more about GameCircle, you can watch the video below:



The features that Amazon is offering probably sound very familiar to Apple’s Game Center and that’s because they are. The Game Center first launched with iOS 4 in 2010, took many cues from Microsoft’s Xbox Live service, including an integrated friend system, leaderboards, and unlockable achievements. This month Apple will extend Game Center beyond iOS and to the Mac with the launch of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. By doing this, the upgrade will offer cross-platform play between Macs, iPhones, and iPads.

Source: Amazon

[emmanravalo]

why and what for?! i dont even find the game center usefull

[EntraVoxe]

Yeah game center is not my favorite of things. Maybe amazon will spark some competition in apple and in process apple maybe will try and make game center better. That would be nice.

[pasmaczek]

I hate game center and never use it anyway. I have a Kindle Fire but I have it rooted and Google Play installed instead of using the Amazon store anyway. Maybe like someone else said, apple will improve Game Center based on the competition.