AMAZON IS NOW PAYING GAME DEVELOPERS OF POPULAR ALEXA SKILLS
As reported by Bret Kinsella on voicebot.ai, Amazon will be paying customer usage fees to its top Alexa skills developers starting April 2017. So far we don’t know much about the program as Amazon has not given many clues about how the program will be rolled out or run.
In fact in its initial communications, Amazon framed the discussion with phrases like “…we’re exploring new ways to reward…” and “…you are eligible for a reward.” Of course, we in the indie game industry are always delighted to be recognized – let alone rewarded – but we’ve also been clamoring for monetization schemes for some time. Our own Joseph Jaquinta is on record asking for assistance so that we as game developers can focus on the important business of making cool games:
“If developers are freed up from the pain and hassle of working out monetization schemes for their skills, they can focus on creating interesting and valuable content. The developers win. The consumers win. The vendor wins.”
(For more from Joe, please check out his video on monetization for Google Home and Amazon Echo.)
For Amazon, the reward program is a way to put in place incentives for developers to maintain and revise their Alexa game skills. It will be interesting to see whether this program is meant to test-the-waters for a broader roll out to other skills categories or whether Amazon will explore the subscription-content revenue model as well.
The big take home message is that the customer usage fees program is still nascent. There is still a lot of ambiguity around important questions. How does Amazon define “customer usage”? How firm is its commitment to the customer usage fees concept? What will be the reward for driving traffic to Amazon’s platform (as opposed to Google’s)? How will the other industry players respond?
