Amazon's cloud gaming service?

Image from Amazon

So the other week images of a controller sparked rumours and talk of Amazon entering the cloud gaming market. The problem being the controller in the images has been around for a while, it's not new it's just something Amazon has run out of stock on. I mean you can buy the controller on Ebay right now.

The controller was part of Amazon's first push into gaming with the Fire TV where they sold the fire controller as a separate thing while allowing you to play games on the Fire TV. I actually have some games on the Fire TV because for a few years ago Amazon was giving out free games on their app store and some of the free apps were made compatible with Fire TV sticks or in my case the Fire TV. (These are apps you download and install on the device)

Source = photograph I took 

Yes that image shows the Tell Tale Game of Thrones game and also A Bards Tale and Valiant Hearts. Not shown is Also Tell Tale's The Walking Dead I can't tell you how they play as I've never bothered with them due to having a Laptop and a console as options. It is however worth pointing out you can in theory connect any Bluetooth controller to the Fire TV. 

Again a photo I actually took lol

So yeh those people who saw the controller and jumped at the idea of it being related to Amazon's cloud gaming service, sorry to disappoint those outlets. It is true Amazon seems to want to get into gaming as it already owns at least 2 game studios at last count and they're working on modifying a game engine to use as sort of their engine for their studios.

However it I think it is worth speculating about a possible Amazon Cloud Gaming service

EVERYTHING BELOW THIS POINT IS SPECULATION

so I'm not the most technical person when it comes to computers etc but that also means I can hopefully come up with some interesting ideas and theories about a possible future Amazon Cloud streaming game service.

Firstly while no information seems to be known about the Strange space on a Chromecast Ultra and as far as anyone knows it's not accessible by the user. Amazon displays the information on their Fire TV Sticks and the new Fire TV cube in a nice handy table.

Taken from Amazon's website

With Generation 1 Chromecasts having a reported 2GB of storage and more recent ones clocking in at 256MB even though the Ultras storage capacity is unknown I'd take a guess at it not being 8GB. Now you might be wondering what difference this makes? Well this allows users on FireTVs to download some of the smaller games fully to the system. But that's not the major point of cloud gaming, the point is to run game you don't have the hardware to otherwise run or run them at a quality higher than hardware you have can manage. In theory Amazon could section off some of its device's storage space say 1GB or so with an Amazon Cloud gaming app that users could download. Why section off 1GB? Well you could use that to store some game elements locally or download the files compressed and then uncompressing them to take some strain off the service. Let's say you can a pre-rendered cutscene in a game, well in theory it could be downloaded from the cloud and stored on the device then when you get to that part of the game the server sends a signal to the device to play said pre-rendered custscene (on older games some of these were even store as video files in game files). Meanwhile the server load up the next area of the game essentially paused, once the cutscene is almost done the game sends a signal back to the server to reconnect to the stream and be ready to start the next area running. This method of downloading compressed pre-rendered cutscenes and uncompressing them on a device (if possible) could seriously cut down on the data usage issues that people suspect will come with Stadia. Admittedly this would only work with games with pre-rendered cutscenes and so games that do all cutscenes in engine wouldn't be able to pull this off.

With Amazon already owning Twitch thus having plenty of experience of steaming, coupled with having had a prior attempt at selling games with the Twitch game store it does seem like the groundwork could be there to try and create a cloud streaming service similar to Google's Stadia and like Stadia is meant to integrate into Youtube it's possible Amazon could build in some kind of Twitch streaming to the service.  Also with Amazon doing free games with Amazon Prime if you link to your Twitch account I can easily see them maybe included one or more game for the Amazon Cloud gaming service (if it ever happens) as part of that deal to encourage people to use the system as Amazon does seem to like bundling free stuff for their other services in with Prime.

So anyway that's my thoughts on this whole Amazon cloud gaming service rumour and some speculation on how if they did it they could try and change some things possibly