Rumors about Amazon’s upcoming game console have been floating around for months, further fueled by Amazon’s recent acquisition of resurgent game developer Double Helix (who were behind the excellent Killer Instinct). Today, those rumors came to a head as Amazon finally announced the Fire TV, a $99 micro TV media box that also plays games (with the controller shipping separately).
Gaming is not the Fire TV’s primary focus, but the microconsole seems more than well equipped to handle it- it comes with 2GB of RAM, has a dedicated mobile GPU, a quad core processor, HDMI output, dual band dual antenna Wifi, and Dolby Digital Plus surround sound. The microconsole is built entirely on a mobile architecture, but it sounds powerful enough, and Xbox 360/PS3/Wii U like graphics should not be out of the question at all.
Fire TV is a very well rounded, well equipped media box, with support for nearly every single major third party video service (HBO Go being the only exception so far); it runs on Amazon’s proprietary forked Android OS, and features voice search that we are promised actually works.
As far as games go, Amazon touted the third party support- publishers such as EA, Disney, Mojang, Ubisoft, and Take Two are all on board, although it is to be noted that they are all on board with iOS and Android devices as well, and that doesn’t seem to help their game libraries much. Indeed, Amazon’s proclamation that the average price of games will run between $1.85 and $2 seems to point towards Fire TV’s game support being more akin to mobile games than actual consoles- something Mojang explicitly confirmed when they announced that Fire TV’s version of Minecraft is the Pocket Edition, and not the full thing.
Amazon itself is also bringing out games for the thing- one of these is called Sev Zero, a rather impressive looking third person shooter. In total, more than a dozen games are in development internally at Amazon.
Amazon Fire TV launches today, so if you’ve wanted a TV media player for a while now, this would be the time to jump. Fire TV’s credentials as a game console may be a little lacking, but as an all around media player, it seems unparalleled.