Blitz 1UP

Indie gaming, meet Kindle...

by Spry Fox is an match 3 puzzle game in which you are trying to grow a city. The larger the city you build, the more points you score. You build your city by matching three or more game-pieces: combine three grasses to make a flower, three flowers to make a bush, three bushes to make a tree etc. until you've filled the board with houses, cathedrals and castles. Along the way, you'll have to outwit evil barbarians and wizards who will try to block your progress. All pretty standard stuff.


But what's really interesting is that this is the first independently published game for Amazon's Kindle e-reader and it's one of only a handful of games available on the platform. This is virgin territory, especially when compared to the 300,000+ apps now available on iTunes!


Whether the game succeeds will be interesting to watch. Amazon famously haven't revealed any hard sales numbers for the Kindle but estimates put it somewhere over 3 million as of the start of this year. Just what percentage of those Kindle owners are interested in playing and buying games on the device will be interesting to watch. There's huge potential for early developers on the platform if it does take off.

Advertisement

One thing that could put a damper on the whole platform though, is the apparent lack of visibility for games within the Kindle store. Currently the games show up along with the books. While magazines, newspapers, accessories and even blogs get their own tabs, games are nowhere to be found.

Hopefully, just like the Kindle itself, this is something that will improve over time.


You can check out the game yourself in the Kindle store:

Or if you're feeling up for some kindle development related action why not register to become a beta developer now?

indiegamedeveloperfunMusingPlatforms

Back to News

Latest Comments

• Be the first to comment on this story.

Articles Archive

RSS