Amazon recruiting for ‘ambitious’ new PC game

Amazon Game Studios is recruiting a number of new staff to work on an ambitious new PC title.

According to a job posting on Gamasutra, the development team in Seattle is said to employ staff who have previously worked on titles including The Last of Us, Half-Life 2, Halo, Infamous and Shadow of Mordor. Staff already working at the studio include Portal creator Kim Swift and Splinter Cell designer Clint Hocking.

According to the Amazon Game Studios website, there are 70 job vacancies open across its development teams.

The studio said it will be using the “latest technology” to build the title, though did not specify what this might be. Earlier this year, Crytek co-founder Faruk Yerli told Develop the company had signed a “huge” licensing deal that helped put its financial problems behind it.

According to sources speaking to Kotaku, the mystery firm involved may have been Amazon, which is said to have licensed the CryEngine in a deal worth between $50m to $70m.

Last year, Amazon’s VP of games Mike Frazzini also suggested that its “ambitious” new game, which may be the same title that’s being teased now, would use the retail giant’s cloud technology to handle thousands of characters on screen at once. The game was touted for the Fire TV however, rather than PC.

“We’ve already got a prototype of a game that we’ve now put into full development where there are thousands of characters on the screen simultaneously interacting,” said Frazzini at the time.

“The tremendous amount of physics and AI in this sort of game would require a high-end gaming PC, but we’re running part of it in the Amazon cloud and part of it on the device. It’s an interesting experience that we’ve always wanted to create but haven’t been able to due to the limitations of the devices.”