Amazon might be working on a game console, after all. The online-retail giant on Thursday confirmed its purchase of Double Helix Games, the PC and console video-game maker behind Silent Hill Homecoming and the reboot of Killer Instinct for Xbox One, for an undisclosed amount of money. The deal “was for both talent and IP,”. Double Helix’s 75 employees in Irvine, California, will now work for Amazon.
Amazon has been the subject of multiple hardware rumors for quite some time, some of which never panned out. Remember all the Amazon Smartphone rumors? So far, that hasn’t shown up. It’s done well in the tablet world. First it came out with the Kindle and we finally had an e-reader that worked and was useful after decades of trying. Ok, so Amazon had a major assist from E Ink with its panel. But Amazon took the ball and ran with it because it had content to sell. Apple has made several markets viable where others failed, but in the case of the e-reader, that was Amazon’s win. Then it came out with a tablet. Competing against all those Android tablets, it has done respectable against hardware veterans like Asus and Lenovo. More importantly, though, it had a hardware design and software that it could repurpose for other applications.
