Amazon Bolsters Gaming Push With Three New Fire Exclusives

Amazon is ramping up its campaign to become a major player in the gaming market, unveiling three titles for its Fire phones and tablets this week along with accompanying trailers. Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos' company has spent the past year acquiring established platforms and stocking up on developer talent.

Amazon on Tuesday announced "Til Morning's Light," a haunted-mansion adventure for Fire Phone, the tower-defense title "CreepStorm" for Fire tablets and "Tales From Deep Space," also a Fire tablet exclusive.

Earlier this year, Amazon poached a number of talented game designers with resumes that include well-known titles like “Far Cry 2,” “Portal,” “BioShock” and “Left 4 Dead.”

The company is hoping that at least one of its new titles becomes a hit along the lines of Rovio's "Angry Birds," launched in 2009 and downloaded more than 2 billion times across a number of platforms, or .Gears Studios' "Flappy Bird."

Early interest isn't too encouraging, however. The CreepStorm trailer (below) had less than 3,000 YouTube views as of early Wednesday.

Amazon is looking to tap a gaming market, currently valued at around $75 billion globally, that has rapidly expanded in recent years due to the emergence of tablets, mobile phones and streaming TV devices. But for multimedia powerhouse Amazon, the industry has proved tough to crack. Amazon Game Studios, founded in August 2012, has yet to produce a major hit.

That's not for lack of trying. Amazon upped its video game strategy by purchasing popular streaming platform Twitch in August for almost $1 billion, and buying out Irvine, California-based Double Helix Games for an undisclosed sum in February.

Amazon’s ultimate goal is to establish itself as a one-stop source for a variety of media: streaming entertainment, television shows and films, books, magazines and video games. Whether the e-commerce site will succeed in gaming is an open question. What's not in doubt is that it needs at least one title to leave a lasting impression.