Amazon announced today their own streaming set top box called the Fire TV, a competitor to the Apple TV. It’s quite a beefy machine with a quad core CPU, a dedicated GPU and 2GB of ram. It runs on Android and will be available today for $99. As was expected, Amazon focused a lot on games at their unveiling event, and even showed a trailer featuring more than 12 games being made internally by Amazon Games Studios. The first one is Sev Zero, a third-person shooter that looks like a mash-up between Halo and Gears of Wars judging by the screenshots. The Fire TV will also have a version of Minecraft and Gameloft will bring Asphalt 8 to the platform.
In addition, Amazon has also made a dedicated gaming controller for the Fire TV for $40 that will come with a voucher that will give you some Amazon Coins. It sure seems like everyone wants to be under your TV nowadays and we’ll have to wait and see if Amazon can find success in this market. It’ll also be very interesting to see where Apple goes with their Apple TV device, which we’ve anticipated for what feels like forever would eventually be updated with game playing functionality.
