ABSTRACT
This chapter foregrounds Amazon as a case study model of an emerging new media ecosystem. With close attention to Amazon’s acquisition and build strategy, this chapter unravels the complex intersections of the company’s tech-centric portfolio and considers the impact of Amazon’s holdings and approach—as a media company with significant traction in e-commerce, engine-based middleware and related media and communications hardware—on broader game-based economies. Amazon software, hardware and data holdings form an elaborate ecosystem that crosses a series of industrial vectors: entertainment, news, information, manufacturing, science, technology, commerce. By looking closely at the build of Amazon’s proprietary Lumberyard game engine, and its parallel development of the Alexa Engine, this chapter focuses on the precise impact of engine-based mechanics on a marketplace of goods, services and ideas.
