Ketu Patel revealed a lot of insights about the ins and outs of their video game business via interview.
Regarding the games business this year, Patel cited great performance from 7th gen, including better than expected performance of GTA V, The Last of Us, and Skylanders, as reasons their games business did so well this year. On the other hand, multigeneration efforts like Call of Duty, Battlefield and Assassin’s Creed did not do as well as expected. There seems to be hesitation to upgrade gaming generations, so Amazon expects an increase in trade-ins.
More about Amazon’s own gaming business plans after the jump!
Patel dismissed talk about Nintendo’s imminent doom, and likewise has dismissed talk that digital stores like PSN and XBL are the end of their business. Amazon itself sells PSN and XBL services (in terms of subscriptions and point cards), and has pointed out that, rather than retail and digital cannibalizing each other, the two markets have incrementally added to total sales.
Regarding microconsoles, Patel dismissed rumors that Amazon was planning to make their own. He also pointed out that Ouya and Gamestick did not sell that well, and they really did not expect that much from this segment in the 1st place.
Finally, and this should be no surprise, but Patel has categorically denied long-running suspicions that they deliberately spark rumors with ‘leaks’. It’s something that occasionally benefits publishers with exposure, but in their words, they “100 per cent never do it intentionally”.
