New Media Ecosystems: Amazon and the Advancing Game Economy

Eric Freedman's paper examines Amazon's expanding presence in game-based technologies and the broader implications of that presence for digital economies. The central argument is that Amazon's acquisition of the CryEngine codebase in 2015 (for its Lumberyard engine) and its 2016 purchase of the Twitch streaming platform, combined with Amazon Web Services, have produced an integrated ecosystem linking game developers and players. The paper positions Amazon as a media company whose influence spans e-commerce, middleware, and consumer hardware, and it argues that game engines are becoming foundational to commerce, artificial intelligence, and everyday interfaces.

The analysis links Amazon's Alexa voice service and connected devices to this engine-driven infrastructure, suggesting that Amazon uses game spaces as testing grounds for new interaction models and crowdsources research through its developer and streaming communities. The paper notes that Lumberyard's adoption rate trails that of Unity and Unreal, yet Amazon continues to invest in extending game-based mechanics across Internet-connected devices. Its evidence includes a May 2019 Washington Post report on Amazon's gamification of warehouse work across five facilities since 2017, where games such as MissionRacer and PicksInSpace reward employees for completing physical tasks.

The author concludes that gamification can raise productivity, particularly in repetitive, low-skill labor, but also intensifies surveillance and the collection of precise performance metrics, while the underlying algorithms remain opaque. The study draws on theoretical work concerning the materiality of information and the social influence of algorithms, and it focuses on how engine-based mechanics shape marketplaces of goods, services, and ideas. The paper was presented at DiGRA 2019 and is a qualitative, theory-informed analysis rather than a quantitative survey.