Maybe so. From the Company Town blog on the LA Times site:
Amazon.com has been quietly recruiting game developers, posting dozens of jobs on its site.
Why this burst of interest in game design from the world’s largest online retailer? P.J. McNealy, founder of Digital World Research, believes that Amazon is amassing resources to potentially become a force in mobile social gaming.
While traditional video games aren’t going away, that part of the industry is also not growing very fast. Mobile and social games, however, are booming. Gaming on tablets, in particular, is taking off.
Amazon is well positioned to capitalize on that because it is the No. 2 player in the tablet market, with its array of rapidly selling Kindle devices trailing only Apple Inc.’s iPads, McNealy suggested in a research note published Monday.
The idea is that Amazon could become the next big gaming platform — acting as a hardware and software gateway for games in the same way that the PlayStation, Wii and Xbox have for decades.
“Amazon is quietly lurking, and gaining strength,” McNealy wrote. “And they’re hiring.”
Read the rest of the article on the Company Town blog.