Last week at GDC there were a bunch of announcements from Unity but one we are very excited to share is a commitment from Unity for better support for publishing to Fire OS. Over the past year Unity has been adding lots of features to their platform as they continue their commitment to quality and innovation. That being said, it’s never been a better time to make Unity games for Fire OS and Amazon Appstore. To help get you started, here are some of the best blog posts we’ve published about using Unity from the past few months:

Now is the perfect time for Android developers to get into the growing streaming device segment with their existing Android app or game. Android developers will find that developing for Amazon Fire TV is familiar, and optimizing their apps for the new controllers and TV display will not require learning a new language or new frameworks. Join Amazon’s Mario Viviani, Technology Evangelist, to learn how to bring your Android apps and games to the living room with Amazon Fire TV. For developers, Amazon Fire TV can help you increase your customer base by putting your app in the living room, in front of people who enjoy entertainment and may not have seen your apps before.

Join us on March 31^st to learn how to go From Mobile to TV—Creating a Native Android Media Streaming App for Amazon Fire TV. During this webinar, we will:

• Dive into the Leanback Android support library.
• Help you understand how to take advantage of the big screen while using UI patterns for app navigation through the remote.
• Teach you how to run your first TV app on Amazon Fire TV.

If you’ve considered building a TV app or are interested in learning how, reserve your spot today!

 For 7:00am PST (3:00pm BST) on Thursday, March 31, 2016

For 1:00pm PST (9:00pm BST) on Thursday, March 31, 2016

I look forward to seeing you attend the webinar!

- Mario

Amazon Appstore is growing our UK team!  We invite you to learn more about the marketing, technical, and business development roles available in our central London office.  Learn more and apply at the links below. 

Online Content & Marketing Manager

Do you want to select the next big apps and games to feature on Amazon Appstore and Fire devices in the UK? Bring the customer shopping experience to the next level? We’re seeking an enthusiastic, organized and detail-oriented Online Content & Marketing Manager to help grow our business by using innovative merchandising techniques and testing. They will plan and schedule Appstore content across Fire tablets, Fire phone, Fire TV, Android and Blackberry devices and our Amazon.co.uk website.

With Advertise Your App, you can promote your app to millions of users on Fire tablet wakescreens and mobile placements on the Amazon Mobile Ad Network. Getting started is easy: you can create an Advertise Your App campaign in less than 90 seconds, and launch a campaign with as little as $100. And the best part? You only pay when a user clicks on your ads.

We are excited to announce that you can now drive app installs with new interstitial ad placements. Advertise Your App provides two interstitial ad templates: Medium Rectangle and Full Screen Image. Both templates are responsive and will expand to match the size of any mobile device’s screen.

This past week, SDKBOX launched Amazon In-App Purchasing (IAP) within its revolutionary live game operations platform. With this announcement, Cocos developers will be able to enable frictionless Amazon payment options such as in-game currency, expansion packs, upgrades, and more for purchase within apps. SDKBOX is a live operations framework that supports major services for mobile game production and operation, in the areas of analytics, user acquisition, monetization, advertising, including platform support for Cocos2d-x.

Over 700,000 registered developers leverage the award-winning Cocos2d-x open-source game engine, which currently features over 50,000 published titles to date, including some of the world’s top grossing games like Clash of Kings, Puzzle & Dragons, Monster Strike, Fantasy Westward Journey Mobile, Big Fish Casino, The Legend of Mir 2, and The King of Fighters' 98. Kai Zhao, Head of Operations for SDKBOX, said:

“We are continuing to expand our platform leadership with seamless access to key services such as Amazon’s In-App Purchasing API. Cocos developers will be able to enable fast, easy purchasing to increase engagement and monetization within their apps.”

With the addition of Amazon IAP to the SDKBOX platform, Cocos developers can enable simple, secure, and trusted 1-click purchase experiences, resulting in increased engagement and conversion rates for purchases within apps.

Publishing to the Amazon Appstore

For more information on Amazon IAP for SDKBOX, please visit www.sdkbox.com. If you are a first time game developer or a seasoned pro, the Amazon Appstore is the perfect place for your latest creation. We offer some great tools and services to help make your game more successful like Amazon IAP, Ads, Merch, Underground and our collection of Fire OS devices. Here are some additional links to help you gets started:

• Register for a free developer account
• Submit your game
• Make the Amazon Appstore Your Game’s Home

With Advertise Your App, you can promote your app to millions of users on Fire tablet Wakescreens and mobile devices on the Amazon Mobile Ad Network. Getting started is easy; you can create an Advertise Your App campaign in less than 90 seconds, and launch a campaign with as little as $100. And the best part? You only pay when a user clicks on your ads. Have a limited budget? No problem! We never exceed the budget you set. Whether you are aiming to do a burst campaign, when you spend a large portion of your marketing budget in a very short time period, or drive an “Always On” strategy, when you spread your marketing budget out over time, Advertise Your App has a solution for both.

You can now create recurring campaigns for your Advertise Your App ads. A recurring campaign will continue to run until it is manually stopped by you and drives an “Always On” user acquisition strategy. You can also choose to select the "set cost-per-download limit" option. This option will allow us to automatically renew your campaign only if it meets the cost-per-download value set by you for the designated period (14 days, 30 days or 90 days). According to comScore*, Amazon users are 72% more likely than general users to discover and download an app via an ad. With the Advertise Your App cost-per-download limitation in combination with a recurring campaign you can build up your app user base with new Amazon users within your budget on a constant basis as long as the ad campaign stays under your CPD limitation.

Gone are the days where you can make a game and publish it to a single platform and expect to be successful. Like any business that sells consumer products, you need to go where the people are. That means the games you make should run on a multitude of different platforms and accept any number of different input types. There’s also one more catch: your players expect to be able to share their game data across all of these different platforms, especially if they are paying for your game multiple times. With that in mind I have outlined what I call “responsive game design,” which is modeled loosely after some of the core concepts of responsive web design. It’s also a framework that will help you think about enabling your games to scale across multiple platforms.

Join us on February 26^th to learn how to go From Idea to Appstore—Building Successful Cross Platform Games. At the end of this webinar you will know how to:

• Build games that scale correctly across multiple platforms.
• Take a raw idea and turn it into a shippable product.
• Design your game to work across multiple resolutions, different input devices and on different types of hardware.

Reserve Your Spot Today

Want to learn more? Register today to learn how to builc your first cross-platform game:

Register for 7:00am PDT (3:00pm GMT) on Friday, February 26, 2016

Register for 1:00pm PDT (9:00pm GMT) on Friday, February 26, 2016

-Jesse

On November 3^rd 2015 300+ attendees, two tracks about monetization and gaming, 13 sessions, multiple guest speakers and the Amazon Appstore evangelists animated a very successful developer-focused conference: the Amazon Appstore Developer Summit 2015, which took place at CodeNode, London.

The Amazon Appstore Developer Summit focused around unique insights into the Amazon Appstore ecosystem, emerging user interfaces and devices that are driving new user behaviors, like Fire TV and Amazon Echo, and new business models like Amazon Underground and Merch, which are opening up opportunities for customers and the developer community.

Here you can find the recordings of all the sessions, complete with slides, organized by topic:

Building games as an indie or AAA studio is serious business. Join the Amazon Appstore and AWS during our GDC developer day event on March 15^th, 2016 as we teach you everything from game ideation, creation, scaling, monetization, marketing, polishing and publishing. We have an incredible line up of speakers, including Amazon evangelists and industry thought leaders from Twitch, Backflip Studios, Yacht Club Games and King. Come get practical advice and best practices on how to scale the business side of your game development. The developer day is part of the official GDC programming, so if you are attending GDC make sure to come out and check out the full list of talks we’ll be giving. Click here to register.

From a One Person Shop to Indie Dev to AAA: What It Really Takes to Grow

10:00am-11:00am

We've entered a golden age of creativity and experimentation. Today, anyone with an idea can build a game and publish it to a global audience.  How does the gifted amateur become a pro game developer, and from there, a games industry success story? Hint: it requires more than just programming or artistic talent. In this session, we'll show you how to approach game development as a business - even if business isn't your "thing." We'll look at the single most-important skill you can develop, and show by example what happens if you neglect it. We'll also offer practical insights on choosing a game genre, development environment, and target hardware as well as how to monetize your game.

Want a great chance to show your game to the media and indie game community? Well, you’re in luck because it so happens we can make that happen. We have 4 slots available in The MIX 2016, and we’re looking for the next indie game that will get people talking. The 5^th MIX showcase is happening March 14^th from 7pm till late at the IGN headquarters, 625 2^nd Street in San Francisco.  

What do you have to do to get in on this you ask? Easy, send your game to me. Okay, there’s a little more to it than that but not much. Submit your game and be ready to demo it on an Amazon device like the Fire tablet or Fire TV. For more details, including how to submit your game for consideration, read on. 

In July 2014, we released In-App Purchasing (IAP) v2.0, which represents an evolution of the API with several major updates. With the continued focus on the newer IAP v2.0 we will deprecate v1.0 of the API on April 30, 2016. This means that new apps submitted with IAP after April 30^th, 2016 must be on v2.0. If you make an update to an existing IAP v1.0 app after April 30, 2016 you must migrate to v2 by that date. We have created detailed documentation on the process to help you make the transition. If you have not already updated your app, here are some highlights on the features of v2.0 and migration details are noted below.

IAP v2.0 contains several major updates. First, per popular request, we’ve provided an immutable transaction identifier by replacing PurchaseToken with ReceiptId. This allows developers to easily de-dupe transactions, as well as better reconcile transaction records with Amazon reports available in their Amazon account. Second, we’ve included a new feature that allows for in-app item fulfillment notification. By using the notifyFulfillment() method, developers can tell Amazon whether or not an order was fulfilled to the customer, allowing for better order tracking. Third, Amazon is providing cancellation notification where we notify the developer if an order is cancelled so they can respond by taking appropriate action within their app. Finally, we’ve introduced App Tester as a replacement to SDKTester to improve testing based on developer feedback. After testing your app locally, you can use the Live App Testing service to beta test your app in a live production environment with a select group of users.

With Advertise Your App, you can promote your app to millions of users on Fire tablet wakescreens and mobile placements on the Amazon Mobile Ad Network. Getting started is easy; you can create an Advertise Your App campaign in less than 90 seconds, and launch a campaign with as little as $100. And the best part? You only pay when a user clicks on your ads.

Previously, the only way to track Google Play conversions was to integrate our Mobile Ads SDK. Recently we added a new feature to help developers track and improve campaign performance: the Google Play referrer tag. With the Google Play referrer tag, you can now use a referrer tag to see the number of users that installed your app from the Google Play Store.

Our App Testing Service (ATS) allows you to test your app’s compatibility on the Amazon Appstore for Android, Fire tablets, and Amazon Fire TV.  Today we’ve upgraded our existing Nexus 7 fleet of devices so you can now receive compatibility results for Android 6.0 Marshmallow apps and games.

Simply drag and drop your Android APK into the App Testing Service and in as little as 90 seconds you can receive a detailed report of potential issues that could affect your apps’ compatibility with the Amazon Appstore – including guidance on how to resolve them before publishing. You can view the test results which will include screenshots, logs, CPU and Memory utilization information from actual devices that we run the automated tests on using Amazon appXplorer. We will also detect and flag crashes during the automated tests that will help you identify potential compatibility issues of your app.

Today, there are trends to drive adoption that include integrating social sharing and engagement features into an app. Tomorrow’s trends will take social marketing to a more professional level. Soon, top apps will have a fully realized fan base that will drive user acquisition, engagement, and alternate streams of revenue that occur entirely outside the app itself. That fan base will include users, content creators, advocates and new customers. Learn how top eSports apps are already driving more engagement and revenue with a fan base, and learn how to you can do this with your own app.

Join us on January 28^th to learn How to Turn Players to Fans - Top Techniques to Build a Fan Base and Increase User Engagement. At the end of this webinar you will know how to:

• Build a fan base by tapping into early adopter’s enthusiasm and increasing retention
• Turn your VIP players into your key product advocates
• Sell physical goods to lower user acquisition costs and increase revenue with Merch by Amazon

Reserve Your Spot Today

Want to learn more? Register today to learn how to lower your user acquisition costs and increase customer retention by building a fan base.

Register for 7:00am PDT (3:00pm GMT) on Thursday, January 28, 2016

Register for 1:00pm PDT (9:00pm GMT) on Thursday, January 28, 2016

-Mike

Integrating and updating the Amazon Mobile Ads API in Android Studio just got easier with the API release on JCenter. Jcenter is a popular repository of build-artifacts that can be integrated directly within Google’s Android Studio and the Gradle open source build automation system. If you develop your app using Android Studio, you can integrate the Amazon Mobile Ads API by adding just a few lines of code and set up your build.gradle file so it is always on the latest version of the SDK.

The Amazon Mobile Ads API helps monetize apps and games on Android, iOS, and Fire OS phones and tablets. The network serves highly relevant ads from Amazon and other brand advertisers in the US, Europe, and Japan.

To get started:

1. Create an Amazon developer account here.
2. Obtain an Amazon Application Key.
3. In Android Studio, insert the following single line of code in your build.gradle file to download and integrate the Amazon Mobile Ads API.