Mike Frazzini, vice president of Amazon Games.
Mike Frazzini, vice president of Amazon Games.
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Amazon bets big on gaming with high-profile hires

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 7 min

Amazon clearly has ambitions in the high end of the game business. Today, it announced that Command & Conquer veteran Louis Castle has become the head of Amazon Game Studios in Seattle. It has also hired high-profile developers such as John Smedley, Rich Hilleman, and others as well.

And the company is using its Twitch gameplay livestreaming division and its Amazon Web Services as the foundation of its relationships with game companies. It has also recruited high-profile developers such as Leslie Benzies and Chris Roberts to use its Lumberyard game engine, which was initially licensed from Crytek and is now Amazon’s own technology. Getting those developers to use Amazon’s game technology gives the company cred with gamers and the game industry.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.