Amazon's strategy is to be a smarter GE, by expanding into new areas that feed power into the Amazon flywheel.

EA would give them control over a core library of content and IP, that they could use to (a) ensure continued access into home consoles for their other products, (b) run as a game on demand service attached to Prime, or (c) make exclusive to launch their own console.

And it seems like the sort of business Amazon likes: good profit margin trend line, but more valuable within the Amazon ecosystem than outside it.

Completely agree, there are synergies in these acquisitions, but it's also the breadth of them as well. Amazon has become a very broad business with vast distances between business units, but with a thread of related interested between them. Much like GE really, GE is routed in "old school" engendering, and thats the synergy that connects the relatively unrelated business it owns. For Amazon that synergy is the Internet, if it uses the internet then thats enough of a connection if the financials make sense.

>> Amazon's strategy is to be a smarter GE

I was thinking Mitsubishi. Powerplants and ships would be helpful to them.

> Mitsubishi

In high school, I was thrilled that my DVD player had the same logo as my friend's motorcycle.

Did Mitsubishi produce motorcycles as well? I know about cars.

They could also use that IP to produce movies and television.

What movie was that where there was only one large company that did everything? Kind of scary that we are almost at that point now.

Lots, but I always think of Wall-E with "Buy n Large" (https://pixar.fandom.com/wiki/Buy_n_Large), it seems to be so close to where Amazon will be in 100 years if we let it. Particularly if you include Blue Origin as part of "Bezos/Amazon".

You're trying to find a media reference, but conglomerates that do everything are already a thing; think of the Samsung group that does everything from heavy ship building to microchip manufacturing, insurance, advertising, and a theme park. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol

And the Japanese equivalent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaibatsu

Idiocracy ;)

In that movie, Costco pretty much does everything.

"Welcome to Costco, I Love You"

Yes, that is it. :)

Also the TV Show Mr Robot with E-Corp.

after the franchise wars, all restaurants are taco bell.

Weyland-Yutani?

The Lego Movie

no, really

Umbrella Corporation from Resident Evil?

Alien; the Company.

Yeah, that's Weyland-Yutani.

They tried their own hand at making video games, leading to New World [0] and I believe a few other titles in the works. Limited success, and some massive technical flaws like allowing HTML in comments leading to remote code execution vulnerabilities. But also weird decisions, like simulating all the motions and physics of an axe hitting a tree server-side; that's just silly, all you need is a random success or failure coin flip. You can then do whatever you want with physics and such client-side.

[0] https://www.newworld.com/en-us

This isn't Amazon "long term strategy", it's been their strategy from the very start.

They always wanted to be Sears but in the online world (who had their own credit card, Discover, their own branded product like Craftsman/Diehard/Kenmore/etc).

Amazon feels more like Sears everyday.

They also want to become more involved with live sport broadcasts (NFL and Premier League for example). EA has some major sport licenses (NHL, NFL, FIFA, PGA, F1, UFC)

FIFA they let go, because FIFA wanted to charge them $250m a year if I recall... FIFA wouldn't back down so eventually EA said they'd go out on their own, since they still have to license every specific league separately anyway.

Next year's EA soccer/football game is going to be called "EA Sports Football Club" "EA Sports: FC". It'll be a big gamble, but I think EA is betting that they'll save money in the long term even if they spend a ton on marketing.

I mention this because I wonder how much these sports licenses are worth after the video game is well established.

Those licenses really shouldn’t be allowed to be exclusive.

They are in fact not.

FIFA is not the only football games, PES exist too with fully licensed leagues. Some of them shared between both.

MLB has right now two licensed games (RBI and The Show)

NBA, NHL, and NFL had multiple games between 2K (2K Sports) and EA.

It really comes down to who is willing to pay the enormous fee.

I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon are looking into the longer term Game subscription service, they already have a service for streaming called Luna similar to Stadia.

Stadia is fantastic but it lacks games.

A subscription service that streams games + allows access to it on dedicated gaming hardware such as a console/gaming PC is likely the market amazon wants to attack here.

They did/do have Lumberyard. And I imagine that this means EA games will all use AWS for their cloud functions.

I would have thought its to add a boat load of IP into their "Prime Gaming" play?

This seems fairly broad on the surface, but they've always wanted to own products right as they go pure digital / online distribution. Kindle, prime video, FireTV, etc. I'll bet they feel video games are finally at that tipping point.

With all that impressive infrastructure to get physical product to you overnight or same day, it's still a better and much much more profitable platform for digital goods.

Wild guess, but it could be that Amazon’s strategy involves Twitch somehow.

Data may be their core business.

They have already bought twitch which is more or less related to video games.