Player engagement is the key to success for most mobile games, and Amazon GameCircle is designed to help developers increase engagement through player Achievements, Leaderboards, and game data synchronization. We recently added two new features: (1) expanded player profiles with cross-game experience points, called XP, which allow players to track and share their total play time and (2) GameCircle-created achievements across multiple games, called Badges, which enhance players’ overall GameCircle Profile.  Players will enjoy these features as they offer new reasons to revisit favorites as well as incentives to try new games.

Your GameCircle-enabled game now helps players build their public reputation with their friends and the GameCircle community, an advantage over games without GameCircle enabled. The new GameCircle Badges help new players discover your game and re-engage existing customers as they return to satisfy the requirements associated with your game.

Longer Play Time with Experience Points

If your mobile game integrates GameCircle, then your players will automatically earn Experience Points (XP) for the time they spend playing your game; no changes are required to your code. In addition, each achievement in your game now carries an XP reward from 0 to 100 that you specify, up to a total of 1,500 XP for the entire game. We recommend allocating no more than 1,000 XP when launching a new title, leaving at least 500 XP for future expansion in case you add more achievements later. You can change XP allocation at any time for draft achievements, but once an achievement is published, its corresponding XP value is fixed for good.

By earning experience points through playing your games, a player increases their GameCircle Level compared to their peers. GameCircle Level increases steadily as players earn XP for spending time and unlocking achievements in GameCircle-enabled games. For current players with an existing GameCircle account, Amazon has already given them XP, and the appropriate GameCircle Level, based on the achievements they unlocked in the past. New players joining after today will begin at Level 1.

Integrating GameCircle into your mobile game benefits your players, who automatically receive more XP the longer they play. If you take advantage of the GameCircle Achievements service, your game becomes eligible for cross-game badges which offer even more opportunity for players to advance.

Badges Mean More Discoverability

In addition to Experience Points, GameCircle also includes new support for special Badges. Badges are cross-game achievements awarded by GameCircle. These are earned by completing challenges associated with unlocking specific achievements in select games of similar type or in a particular game genre. Up to three badges can be displayed on the player’s profile so he or she can show off favorites earned so far.

For example, players can earn the Zombie Killer badge for unlocking certain achievements in three zombie-related games. Similarly, the Burning Rubber badge is awarded for unlocking specific objectives in two driving games. At launch, there are close to forty special badges available.

Zombie Killer         Burning Rubber

For players who don’t know your app (but have played similar titles), genre-spanning Badges or Badges connecting similar achievements in other games may serve as an introduction to your product. Existing customers may rediscover your game as they explore Badges in game categories that intere them.

GameCircle: Designed to Increase Engagement

GameCircle has always offered Achievements, Leaderboards, and game data synchronization through Whispersync for Games. With these updates to the player profiles—including Achievement XP, GameCircle Level, and Badges—players can easily track and compare their progress across all GameCircle-enabled games.

GameCircle is designed to increase player engagement, improve retention, and enhance the customer experience when playing mobile games on iOS, Android, or Fire OS. For more information about player profiles mobile development, see our online documentation:

• GameCircle Achievements, Leaderboards, and Whispersync for Games
• Cross-Platform Solutions for Android, iOS, HTML5, and More
• Mobile Game Development with Amazon

-peter (@peterdotgames)

If you are a developer who has had an app in our store for a while, or someone new to our platform, we encourage you to use Amazon Appstore and Kindle Fire badges and branding to help promote your app.  In this article we’ll review badges, other images, links and guidelines for their use with your app and marketing.

Badges:

There are two badges with three color-treatments each that you can use. Here are the badges that you can use to promote the availability of your app in our U.S. store:

The Amazon and Kindle Fire badges above are available in English, Spanish, German, French, Italian and Japanese. The Amazon badges are also available in Portuguese.

You can get full-size downloads of these badges on this page, along with some usage guidance.

Other Images

If you’d like to use a plain icon:

Or if you would like to use a Kindle device image:

You can find links to those resources about half way down this page.

Links to the Amazon Appstore

For web-browser based linking, please:

Use this link structure: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/ASINnumber/ref=mas_pm_app_name

Replace the bold “.com” with your country marketplace suffix. (.com for US, .de for Germany, etc)

Replace the bold “ASINnumber” with your mobile app’s ASIN (Amazon Standard Item Number) and app name. Please use an underscore (_) to separate the words in the “app_name” portion, if your title is more than one word. You can find the ASIN on the Product Details section of your mobile app on www.amazon.com/apps.

For example, this is the Air Patriots link in the German marketplace:

http://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B008KE3960/ref=mas_pm_air_patriots

For in-app advertising or mobile app-based linking:

In the US:

Use this link structure: http://www.amazon.com/gp/mas/dl/android?p=com.example.package&ref=mas_pm_app_name

Replace the bold portions with the package name of your APK, and app name respectively.

For our international stores:

Use this link structure:

amzn://android?p=com.example.package

Replace the bold portion with the package name of your APK.

NOTE: With any of these link structures, please test the links before using them to make sure that they direct to the correct page or search results.

The link instructions above are pretty much identical to the guidance near the bottom of this page.

Other Useful Guidelines

There is still more good stuff on the handy page I keep linking to. This includes guidelines for correct use of the Amazon Appstore trademark when blogging or using social media to promote your app. I would, of course, be remiss if I failed to mention the legal requirements listed at the bottom of the page. Our attorneys have done a good job of breaking the important points down into easily readable bullet points. Please do look at them, it won’t take long.

Just in case you missed the link earlier, you can read all of this information here, on our developer portal.