Retail site Amazon has announced the release of its own games console, Amazon Fire TV. The set top box will stream both movies and games, and comes with a quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM and a dedicated GPU.
Rumours that Amazon were building their own console have been doing the rounds for months, but at press event yesterday they were finally confirmed by the online retailer’s company executive Peter Larsen. Content including movies, games and TV shows will be streamed straight to the device, which will apparently run three times as fast as similar devices Apple TV and Roku.
Fire TV will run on Android, and Amazon hope the device will ”invent and simplify” the console streaming market, according to Larsen. It’s also clearly designed as a less powerful but more affordable alternative to the pricey next-gen consoles; thus the more powerful next-gen games won’t be supported. Larsen also revealed that a number of developers including Sega, Telltale Games, Disney, Ubisoft, EA and 2K Games have already agreed to support the platform.
Amazon’s Fire TV is available in the US now, with other regions expected to follow sometime this year.
