Rumors and rumblings of an Amazon console have been heating up for a while now, and their recent purchase of Double Helix Studios (the folks behind the excellent Xbox One reboot of Killer Instinct as well as the just released reboot of Strider) only added fuel to the fire. And while a lot of people were expecting an announcement soon with a release later this year, it appears that it might be closer to us than we thought.
Apparently, Amazon will be releasing a set top box for TV, powered by Android, that will run both licensed Android as well as proprietary software; it will probably be another piece of hardware that slots into Amazon’s Kindle ecosystem, and as such, it might use Kindle OS (which is a heavily forked and modified version of Android). The release is currently pegged to be in March.
If this is true, then this news is actually fairly disappointing, as that would make the upcoming Amazon console not a true console and a competitor to Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo as originally thought, but yet another microconsole with a focus on Android games, such as Ouya and its ilk. A major new entrant into the console market has the potential to shake things up massively and freshen them up a little (the last time we had a new entrant into console gaming was more than a decade ago, with Microsoft), so Amazon squandering its chance like that would be heavily disappointing.
