“Amazon has unveiled GameCircle, a new feature for the Kindle Fire that fits in perfectly as another must-have for any mobile platform: gaming leaderboards and achievements. GameCircle allows you to track your in-game awards, view leaderboards, and save your game progress online,” Ian Paul reports for PCWorld.
“GameCircle has echoes of OpenFeint and Apple’s Game Center, but Amazon’s feature doesn’t appear to have the same social features as the other platforms. Amazon didn’t mention anything about a social component where you can connect with friends to share games and view a friends-only leaderboard similar to Game Center,” Paul reports. “Like other gaming platforms, however, you will be able to view your game-specific collection of achievements including virtual trophies and badges. You can also check out a leaderborad to see how you rank against other Kindle Fire gamers. It’s not clear whether GameCircle will be built-in to games or if there will be a separate GameCircle app as well.”
Paul reports, “Having a centralized gaming feature that tracks gaming progress appears to be a must-have feature for any company offering its own mobile platform. Apple introduced Game Center for iOS in 2010 and is now extending the functionality to the Mac with the upcoming OS X Mountain Lion rollout in July.”
Read more in the full article here.
Thomas Claburn reports for InformationWeek, “Those playing Kindle Fire games with GameCircle will access the service through their Amazon Accounts, just as those playing iOS (and soon OS X) games with GameCenter use their Apple IDs.”
“Google has yet to introduce a competing service for Android game developers, but the company is said to be working on one,” Claburn reports. “GameCircle offers three distinct services: achievements, leaderboards, and sync. Achievements, in the form of virtual badges, trophies, and rewards, are a common mechanism to sustain player engagement. Leaderboards offer players a way to compete against others and against their own past performance in a social context. And sync saves players’ games to Amazon’s cloud, allowing games to be resumed on any Kindle Fire device.”
Claburn muses, “While few Kindle Fire users are likely to worry about playing the same game across multiple devices, they may find sync becomes more useful if Amazon releases a mobile phone that runs a Kindle Fire-compatible version of Android.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Bozos’ Amazon, joins Microsoft, Google, and Samsung in the brain-damaged three-legged puppy parade forever begging over Apple’s table scraps.
Amazon employees should be so proud.
As the owner of a real Kindle with e-ink and a keyboard, let me express my disgust.
Expressed eloquently.
‘“Amazon has unveiled GameCircle, a new feature for the Kindle Fire that fits in perfectly as another must-have for any mobile platform: gaming leaderboards and achievements. GameCircle allows you to track your in-game awards, view leaderboards, and save your game progress online,” Ian Paul reports for PCWorld.’
In other news, the USA sank into the mire while citizens, (and a bunch of others), played games.
Of course Kindle Fire users aren’t worried about playing games with others. No one else owns a Kindle Fire. It’s like all those brown Zunes that had no one to “squirt” music too.
Amazon, you’re soo dumb.
All of it is a copy or spinoff of XBOX Live anyway.
So that’ll be ‘Game Center for tiny screen iPad settlers’ when Apple brings out their small iPad?
Circle smirk!