Amazon plays behind the scenes role with popular social games |
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Amazon plays behind the scenes role with popular social games
Here's an interesting niche for Amazon's cloud computing business: social games. The online retailer is quietly providing the web infrastructure for popular Facebook games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars, according to RightScale, a cloud services management and consulting firm. RightScale says it's working with the top three social gaming companies – Zynga, Crowdstar and Playfish — to "launch, manage and grow" games on top of Amazon's EC2 cloud computing service.
Other games running on EC2 include Café World, FishVille, Happy Aquarium, Pet Society, PetVille, and Restaurant City. RightScale says eight of the 12 most popular games on the web today, with more than 77 million daily active users, are using its EC2-based platform.
As VentureBeat notes, cloud-computing has allowed developers of hit games to "generate huge revenues quickly by tapping into virtual resources" and has made the game market "unpredictable, Darwinian, and open to newcomers." It also looks like a growth opportunity for Amazon and other cloud services.
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