Amazon Wants to ‘Win at Games.’ So Why Hasn’t It?

Three years ago, on a drab, chilly summer day in the Dutch port of Den Helder, Amazon made an extravagant pitch for its first-ever big-budget video game, Breakaway. Amazon had no doubt that Twitch viewers would line up to watch the matches unfold and, later, join the game’s beta release. “The core gameplay was confusing,” one former Amazon Game Studios employee recalled. In a brief written statement, the company’s director of communications, Kinley Pearsall, said: “Making great games is hard, and we’re not going to get everything right, especially at the beginning—that’s part of the nature of inventing, as we’ve learned in lots of new areas Amazon has pursued.