Apple’s Game Center Gets Competition, The Amazon GameCircle [VIDEO]

Last week, Bloomberg published a report regarding Amazon’s plans to develop a smartphone targeting the iPhone and now, Amazon has officially announced its own gaming experience for Kindle Fire called the GameCircle as a direct competition to Apple’s Game Center (via 9to5Mac). Amazon’s GameCircle, which clearly draws cues from Apple’s Game Center, is geared specifically for game developers. The new game service also promises to help players to better experience their games through three key features i.e achievements, leaderboards, and sync.

According to the Amazon Mobile App Distribution blog:

GameCircle is a new set of services designed to make it easier for you to create more engaging gaming experiences and grow your business on Kindle Fire. […] GameCircle will make achievements, leaderboards and sync APIs accessible, simple and quick for you to integrate, and will give gamers a more seamless and entertaining in-game experience

Achievements

GameCircle achievements allow players to track all earned trophies, treasures, badges, awards, and more without leaving the gaming experience. Players can receive in-game messages to keep track of accolades earned in real-time or pause and view an achievements summary to check earned collections and determine what badges are still needed, before returning to gameplay.

Leaderboards

GameCircle leaderboards provide an in-game view of score comparison information and percentile ranking, allowing players to quickly and easily check standings against top players or competitors, without ever leaving your game.

Sync

Sync automatically saves a player’s in-game progress to the cloud and allows them to pick-up exactly where they left off when restoring a deleted game or switching devices. Players will not have to worry about losing progress, scores or achievements between Kindle Fire devices, as all data is securely stored in the cloud.

Developers can sign up for access to the GameCircle APIs at: amazon.com/gamecircle-signup.