Amazon Talks Up Mobile Gaming on Kindle Fire With Apple-Like Features
Amazon’s new GameCircle allows gamers on the Kindle Fire to record and track their achievements and to save their game play to the cloud, similar to features found in Apple’s Game Center.
In a blog post this morning, Amazon said that GameCircle is now available for Kindle Fire through a series of APIs for developers. End-users likely won’t see the features until developers have time to integrate the APIs into their apps.
For now, it appears that GameCircle is only available for apps distributed on the Kindle Fire — not for apps distributed more broadly through Amazon’s Appstore, which operates on almost any Android-based tablet or phone.
Amazon’s GameCircle has three main features:
- Achievements allow players to earn trophies, badges and awards while they are playing games.
- Leaderboards provide a way for players to view their scores in comparison to others.
- Syncing players’ game progress to the cloud allows players to pick up exactly where they left off, which comes in handy if they must delete and re-install an app or are switching between their devices.
