Amazon's TV Box Gets Some More Serious Video Games

The Fire TV, Amazon’s 2014 answer to set-top boxes like Roku and Apple TV, was supposed to have its own gaming identity, with both original titles made by Amazon Game Studios and a focus on “mid-market” games.

In practice, though, the 700-plus game titles currently available on Fire TV have trended toward the casual and overlapped heavily with Amazon’s existing Android Appstore — meaning they didn’t wring much extra value out of the TV box’s $40 controller. A new app called Playcast thinks it can inject some more diversity into the system.

Playcast, an Israeli company now owned by game rental company GameFly, is launching a cloud-based game-streaming service in the U.S. today, and it’ll start exclusively on Fire TV. Rather than paying a flat rate as one might for Netflix (even though Playcast is billing itself as a “Netflix for games”), the service will instead offer bundles of games for varying monthly subscription prices.

Several of those games — including Batman: Arkham Asylum, Fear 3 and Grid 2 — do not yet have mobile versions, meaning the Fire TV may be a cheaper way to get them for gamers who don’t own a console or gaming PC.

Terms of GameFly’s acquisition of Playcast were not disclosed. Competitors in the game-streaming space include Nvidia, which offers a service called Grid, and Sony, which streams its older titles to the PlayStation 4 via a service called PlayStation Now; in April, Sony acquired the patents of an erstwhile competitor, OnLive.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

Will you support Vox’s explanatory journalism?

We'll be honest: advertising alone isn't enough for Vox, or most newsrooms, to do the amount of high-quality journalism that the world needs and keep it free. We count on contributor support in order to produce nuanced, clear, and optimistic journalism. We don't have a paywall or ask our readers to subscribe in order to see our content, so instead, we’re coming to you this #GivingTuesday to ask you to make an investment in our future. If you’ve read an explainer this year that helped you to see an issue more clearly, got the answer to a long-time question, or just plain learned something, then we hope you’ll consider making a contribution of $20 or whatever you can today.

One-Time Monthly Annual

$5/month

$10/month

$25/month

$50/month

Other

$

Yes, I'll give $5/month

Yes, I'll give $5/month

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via