Amazon has finally announced its answer to Apple TV/Chromecast/Roku in the form of Fire TV. But it's not stopping at streaming. Amazon's taking on the gaming world, too.
Apparently, Amazon will be bring in thousands of games from "some of the biggest developers" including Disney and EA. And no you won't be stuck using that tiny controller (although you can if you're a masochist)—Amazon has introduced their very own game controller. Of course, you'll have to shell out $40 for it (in addition to the $100 for the box itself), but that does at least give you 1,000 Amazon coins, to boot. Which will actually be helpful! Games will be coming to you at about $1.85 a pop, but according to an Amazon exec, "thousands will be free."
And the FireTV may be small, but it's packing some serious specs—or at least serious enough to be plenty capable of handling the games we've seen thus far. In that little black box, Amazon's packing a 2 GB of RAM, a quad-core processor, and a dedicated GPU. And at least according to Amazon, that means three times the power of Apple TV, Roku, and Chromecast.
As for the games themselves, you'll be seeing the likes of Minecraft, Monsters' University, Asphalt 8, Sev Zero, and Tower Defense. Amazon's also carrying the original content theme with some original games in the works over at Amazon Game Studios. In addition to the controller, you'll be able to sling games from any of your mobile devices onto your TV and still control them from the device itself.
Compared to the rest of Fire TV, this gaming aspect is the only feature that really sets Amazon apart from the competition. Meaning it's only a matter of time before we start seeing the others play some serious catchup.