Today we announced Amazon GameOn, a cross-platform, competitive gaming service for developers. GameOn is a set of flexible APIs that allow you to easily build cross-platform competitions into your games, allowing your players to compete for real-world prizes fulfilled by Amazon or other in-game rewards. GameOn is built on AWS’s cloud infrastructure and works on any operating system, enabling you to scale quickly and invest more time in what you do best—designing great games.

With GameOn, you have an easy tool to drive engagement, increase monetization, and bring more players in on the action. GameOn currently supports leaderboards, leagues, and multi-round competitions, and gives you the flexibility to create custom events such as local and regional competitions. You can also enable players and streamers to create their own user-generated competitions and invite participants, allowing players to connect with friends and expand their gaming network.

Today, GameOn is being used by nWay, Game Insight, Eden Games, Umbrella Games, Nazara, Mindstorm, Mokuni, Avix, and GameCloud Studios in games ranging from casual to core across different genres. Players in these games already experience the amazing benefits of GameOn from leaderboards to leagues to real-world prizing. Click here to learn more about GameOn.

Competition drives player engagement 

At the core of GameOn are highly engaged players who are passionate about your game. Passionate players spend hours playing your game; they recruit their friends to play, buy your merch, compete in fan art competitions and form a community around what you do. Everyone has a niche of players that looks like this. The question is: how do we get more of them?

We believe that cultivating competition in your game is the key to driving player engagement. Competition elicits an emotional reaction. We believe that finding a way to spark that emotional reaction - that passion - across your base of players is how we're ultimately going to cultivate engagement and build a community around your game.

Developers have proven that community, competition, and content feed into each other, producing some of the most engaging games ever. We created GameOn to give developers a simple, yet powerful toolkit to help increase retention, foster community among players, and to take advantage of the momentum around competitive gaming and esports.

Drive organic acquisition and engagement with in-game competitions

With GameOn, you can easily create competitions that drive organic acquisition of new players and engagement with existing players. Once your GameOn integration is complete, tournament creation is just a few clicks away. We designed an easy-to-use, intuitive interface to make sure everyone, including your marketers and community managers, can manage tournaments. In the GameOn console, you’ll be able to create competitions, define entry requirements, assign prizes, and end competitions. We’ve also made it easy to schedule recurring competitions. Today, you can enable three kinds of competitions: leaderboards, leagues, and multi-round competitions.
 

Leaderboards work particularly well for single-player games like endless runners, match-3, racing, sports, shooters, and puzzle games. For multiplayer games, on the other hand, leagues are very popular. Rather than ranking players on a high score or best time, league players are ranked on number of wins. Either approach can be combined into multiple rounds, where only the top finishers in one tournament advance to the next. Eden Games, the developer behind some of the world’s most successful racing franchises including V-Rally and Test Drive Unlimited, uses GameOn to scale the size of the competitions they run in Gear.Club.

“GameOn has made it easy for us to add leaderboards and tournaments in-game,” said Pascal Clarysse, CMO, Eden Games. “GameOn saved us months of development and a whole lot of maintenance and logistical overhead in the long run.”

GameOn also supports user-generated competitions, so your players can create tournaments of their own—right in your game. They can invite their friends and family to compete, and GameOn will handle all the details, managing matches and score-keeping just the same as for "official" tournaments created by you. GameOn even allows them to password-protect their event if they want to keep the competition private. This is a great way for your influencers and streamers to engage directly with their followers, which encourages them to spread the word and helps fuel your fan base. Let your players help you promote.

Deliver real-world prizes with Amazon

When you set up a tournament in GameOn, you get to choose how to reward the top finishers. GameOn offers the ability to award real-world prizes, delivered right to a player's doorstep. What can they win? That's up to you. As the tournament host, you can choose from tens of millions of eligible items. This includes big-ticket items like Amazon Echo, or made-to-order t-shirts featuring your game's IP. Of course, you can also award in-game items, typically selected from your catalog of power-ups, skins, or other in-app purchases.
 

Game Insight, a leading global developer of cross-platform multiplayer games, is using GameOn to better reward their community in Survival Arena. Anatoly Ropotov, CEO, Game Insight says:

“We’re committed to growing the competitive gaming and esports community, and GameOn APIs give us an exciting new toolset to do this with. We’ve already started using GameOn to provide our fans with real-world prizes and new types of tournaments that allow players to compete against each other across PC and mobile.”

You can choose the prize(s) and we’re able to fulfill this directly on the backend creating a seamless experience for both you and your players. Today, real-world prizing will be available via invitation in the US only. To request an invite, click here.

Try GameOn for free

GameOn does the hard work, so that you can focus on creating engaging competitions for your players. GameOn is a collection of web services running on AWS, so it’s a robust, scalable, and reliable solution that performs well even under heavy load. It exposes a set of REST APIs that are accessible from your backend, or directly from client devices, making GameOn platform- and language-agnostic. We don’t force you to use custom SDKs or libraries to access the service. Use what works for you in whatever language you like best. And the best part? Developers can use GameOn APIs for free until May 1, 2018. After that date, the first 35,000 monthly plays will be free, and the cost for additional plays will be $0.003 per play.

Get started

Getting started with GameOn is easy. Just follow the following three steps to get started today:

1. Sign in with your Amazon Developer credentials. If you don't already have an account, registration is easy and free.
2. Register your game in the Game Settings tab and follow the on-screen prompts.
3. Get your API key.

Game on!