John Smedley interview: Amazon wants games with ‘ridiculous computation’

Posted byby Dean Takahashi
August 19, 2017
Updated June 20, 2025
12 min

John Smedley has had a storied career in games, including the creation of EverQuest, the growth of Sony Online Entertainment, and the spinout of Daybreak Games as an operator of games like the zombie apocalypse online game H1Z1. He even tried a stint as an indie game developer, reliant on Kickstarter funding.

But earlier this year, he joined Amazon Game Studios, starting a new studio in San Diego, California. He is one of many famous game developers to join Amazon, partly because it has so many resources and tremendous advantages. Amazon has acquired the Twitch livestreaming business, created Amazon Web Services to provide cloud infrastructure for connected games, and it has its own Lumberyard game engine.

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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.