MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
Adding in app purchasing through Amazon got a bit easier for Unity developers today as the company launched a line of free plug-ins for the popular game engine.
As more and more mobile developers take to using Unity and Unreal for their games, it makes sense to see a company like Amazon target consumers through game engines.
The plug-ins work with Amazon’s pre-existing in-app purchasing and GameCircle APIs.
"Unity is one of the most popular tools for building mobile games," said Amazon Games director Mike Frazzini.
"Amazon’s in-app purchasing and GameCircle APIs help developers reach more customers, keep them engaged, and make more money. Every week millions of customers are playing GameCircle enabled games and are able to compare scores and compete against friends.
"We want to make it as easy as possible for developers to quickly integrate these features and our new, free plugins make it incredibly simple to do so for anyone using Unity."
Amazon claimed the revenue generated by the average in-app purchasing transaction doubles that of the average paid app transaction.
GameCircle adds a number of social features to games such as leaderboards, whispersync and achievements, and can display them alongside online friends on the Kindle Fire games library.
"We recently integrated GameCircle into Temple Run using the GameCircle plugin for Unity. The process was very easy, and incredibly fast," said Imangi Studios founder Keith Sheperd.
"What would have normally taken days to integrate only took a few hours and it was all very straight forward. We will definitely use the Unity plugin to add GameCircle and In-App Purchasing to our other games."
