Amazon Renames Twitch Prime to Prime Gaming | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Renames Twitch Prime to Prime Gaming

polygon.com

42 pointsdoppp58 comments

>For Twitch viewers. Surprise - nothing changes!

It had only good feature, the adless viewing but they removed that last year. But hey, you don't become the richest man on the planet without a reason

Edit: it was 2018, my bad https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/20/17761760/twitch-prime-tur...

Wait, that seemed like the biggest benefit...

You get ad-less viewing on the one channel you use your Twitch Prime subscription on. It is also a decent benefit in that you can basically contribute a small amount of money to your favorite streamer also. If you were already going to pay for a subscription to someone AND you had Amazon prime, you basically save $60 a year ($5 per sub * 12 months).

Has Amazon provided anything useful to gaming space? They have bought lots of companies, but their track record in gaming space seems to be very poor.

They used to have "Kindle Underground" or whatever, for the Kindle Fire tablets, but they shut that down. Basically you'd get free upgrades to games and stuff at no cost. I used it to play games I'd have on Android for free without having to pay for upgrades. I also returned the same tablet two days later cause it had a dead pixel when I opened it.

Amazon Underground, and as a hobbyist game developer it's the most money I've made on a mobile platform. I was sad to see it go. I put the same game on Amazon, Play, and App stores, with the same (minimal) advertising, and underground was an order of magnitude more profitable.

Is that more profitable per user, or more profitable total?

How can you have either without the other?

$1 per 1000 users on a store that gets you 100 users pays more than $0.01 per 1000 users on a store that gets you 1000.

Right, I think I missed some implicit context here.

Easy. You get a publisher who takes a cut of the per-user profits but who promotes your game and gets you significantly more users, enough so that you end up making more total profit than you would have without the publisher.

I wouldn't call that 'profit', if it's before deducting an expense like that.

More profitable total. Took a lot more users to make the same profit as one sale on the app stores, but because it was free for the end user a lot more played it.

Something like a couple hundred paid on the stores, but over a hundred thousand played the underground version.

That's a shame, I wondered if it was just not profitable for Amazon's end, it sounded too good to be true. I remember the model was... the longer people play your games, the more you make... I guess they didn't think that one through? I don't like subscriptions for games, but a subscription for mobile games I might consider if it keeps the spyware off my phone. I usually opt to pay to remove ads from any games I play long enough. I'm sure I'm one of the rare few though.

Yeah I didn't understand how they planned to make it work long-term, but it was great while it lasted.

Their commercial games have all been flops. They do provide cloud infra for game servers as well, but I have no idea if that's useful or what adoption looks like

Well, AWS and scalability is incredibly useful for game launches; while Fall Guys might be a bad example, you can easily see where well-architected scalability would help. Being able to burst up to 100k+ concurrents at launch and then drop down to, say, 50k, or 20k, is a massive cost savings compared to buying (or leasing) capacity for 100k users and then having most of it sit idle.

I dislike AWS for most projects, since, without any sort of large-scale discount or negotiation, it's vastly more expensive than dedicated hardware, but if I were launching a game like Fall Guys I'd want to launch in AWS, and then migrate to dedicated hosting or hybrid-cloud once things are more even-keeled and you know what your usage patterns are like.

That said, that's not specific to AWS. I can get the same thing on Azure, Google Cloud, Tencent Cloud, etc.

Their game studio published its first big game a couple of months ago called Crucible. It was not good... It basically just ripped off all of the bits of recent popular games without doing anything new.

They had an MMO called New World scheduled to launch this month but it was delayed until at least 2021.

Sounds like the AmazonBasics strategy.

Prior to this they released The Grand Tour Video Game, a tie in to their Prime Video series of the same name. It was also generally poorly received.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Tour_Game

Everyone runs their servers on AWS. I say everyone, definitely Valve, and I'd assume quite a few other firms.

So there's that to start

Sony as well.

They offer a Crytek derived game engine called Lumberyard used for the long-running Star Citizen scam

Free game engine, but not sure if it has significant users.

They seem to be doing a great job running Twitch which brings in a lot of attention, marketing and revenue to the gaming industry. I'm not sure if any of this is Amazon's influence or just the Twitch folk continuing momentum but either way it still seems to be improving.

Twitch is fairly independent from Amazon and AWS.

and what is this if not an attempt to dilute the Twitch brand in favour of the more Amazon-oriented Prime umbrella?

I think Twitch Prime was never very close to Twitch from an organizational perspective. My read is this that this moves likely gives Twitch as an organization more autonomy.

$970 million[0] to Twitch and a storefront from which to buy games.

[0]https://kotaku.com/reports-amazon-to-buy-twitch-for-over-1-b...

This is just "Twitch Prime" being rebranded to "Prime Gaming". Twitch is keeping the same name. But I wonder how long until Twitch is also rebranded to Amazon Gaming?

Seems to be nothing more. I don't see it ever picking up the Amazon name as if there are any issues on the platform, and an streaming platform is going to have them, they don't want a direct association.

I'm a sporadic viewer, but it's not clear what you mean by a streaming platform inevitably having issues?

Twitch has a LOT of issues with their culture and moderation

Can you elaborate?

The nomenclature is thrown off quite a bit by this. Streamers say "Check and see if you have a free Twitch Prime and subscribe"

Renaming Twitch to Amazon Gaming would be like renaming Lamborghini to Volkswagen Sports.

Yeah but they just tossed out "Lamborghini Prime" like it was bad bacon.

A lot of streamers have their in-game or in-client user names include "TTV" to let you know they're on the platform and so you can easily find them.

I wonder how streamers would feel having to change their names from something like "ProGamerTTV" to "ProGramerAG" or if it would even happen/matter.

This will never happen, quote me on it.

Twitch cares a lot about their brand being separate from Amazon. The risk of being associated too closely with Amazon amongst gamers (who are often quick to cancel/escalate) is just too high, and twitch has fantastic branding and (somehow) tons of goodwill from customers.

This only devalues the twitch brand, which stands completely independent of the Amazon brand just fine

Remember Sunrise before Microsoft bought it?

Big companies do stupid things to non-core product offerings they acquire.

I’m happy for the twitch team getting paid but the writing is on the wall that Amazon will nuke their hard work.

Sunrise was acquired as an acquihire, they never indented to have Outlook Mail and Outlook Calendar.

Your post essentially boils down to “Twitch would never let that happen”, but the problem is that it wouldn’t be Twitch’s decision to make.

You say it will never happen because it would devalue the brand, but acknowledge that the action they are taking right now devalues the brand.

Twitch is one offensive drama after the other. I’d say it’s wiser to keep some distance.

As someone who is both new to Twitch and uses it for “alternative” content to gaming (eg. music streams, cooking classes, etc), I find this rebranding confusing and poorly timed. Clearly the platform is mostly for gaming, but the pandemic has highlighted Twitch’s ability to become more than just that. It works quite well for live music events, whether it be a single artist playing in their bedroom to 50 people or a full-on live music festival with 30k viewers. I’ve been attending all manner of these streams for months now, and I don’t see them ending soon, or even after the pandemic subsides. It’s a completely new way for artists and producers to engage with audiences. Entire record labels have multiple weekly streams for their content and communities.

I really hope that Amazon sees the platform for these other uses and makes it more friendly for other content producers. Clearly there is both a need and demand for it.

I agree that Twitch is great for streaming things other than gaming, but the monthly offerings given with Twitch Prime were always gaming related: skins, credits, sometimes full games, etc.

The included subscription is pretty much the only "not necessarily gaming" part about it. Naming it "Gaming Prime" isn't confusing in that context.

Prime Gaming will still display ads all the time?

Yes, you need to pay extra for Prime Ultra Gold edition or whatever it's called these days to not see pre-stream ads. Last I checked it was still impressively expensive.

If Amazon ever builds a highly optimized robot for delivering packages, they could call it....

Optimus Prime

Interesting rebrand.

But why was Doc banned?

As someone who's been watching this space for a little more than a decade.. this is what I've deduced:

Because Mixer died, twitch didn't need the tentpole any longer,

they don't need to pay out a contract if they ban the streamer,

there's a "council of snowflakes" that can't tell make believe from reality, and they pegged him with no disclosure to instil fear in all other streamers, a kind of general deterrence.

Twitch has nowhere to go but down, at this point.

That is all speculation. The council you are talking about has no teeth, and there are many members that aren't "snowflakes."

I misunderstood it, will they rename Twitch next? edited;

Why? There was a lot of money made on the sale.

Yeah but ego always trumps money, and the re-branding is now not when the sale was agreed?

If I started a company called dan.tv and sold it to Amazon for $970 million in cash, and then Amazon renamed it to danisastupidasshole.tv I'd be pretty happy with that deal all in all.

They aren't renaming Twitch. This is a small feature that grants prime users one free subscription a month.

Oh yeah. I missunderstood that

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