Amazon launched GameCircle, a new set of services designed to make it easier for developers to create more engaging gaming experiences and grow their business on Kindle Fire.

“Our goal is to give developers great tools to quickly and easily reach new customers and keep them engaged. That’s why we’re creating easy-to-integrate APIs for features like leaderboards, achievements and sync.  We also introduced In-App Purchasing API in April, allowing developers to offer a seamless 1-Click purchasing experience within their apps and games, and we’re just getting started,” said Paul Ryder, Vice President of Apps, Games, and Services at Amazon. “GameCircle gives developers the right tools to build an immersive, more entertaining experience on Kindle Fire, which will ultimately help developers grow their business.”

GameCircle will make achievements, leaderboards and sync APIs accessible, simple and quick for developers to integrate, while giving gamer seamless and entertaining in-game experience.

Achievements

This allows players to track all their earned trophies, treasures, badges, awards, and more without leaving the gaming experience.  Gamers can choose to receive in-game message to keep track of their achievements in real-time or pause and view their achievements summary to check earned collections so they can determine what badges they still lack before resuming their game.

Leaderboards

This provides gamers an in-game view of score information and percentile ranking, so they can check how they’re doing against other gamers without leaving the game.

Sync

The GameCircle automatically saves a player’s game progress to the cloud so they can resume gaming exactly where they left off when restoring a deleted game or switching devices.  Kindle Fire users never have to worry about losing progress, scores or achievements as all their data are stored in Amazon’s cloud.

Excited partners

A lot of developers are quite excited with Amazon’s new service since it will pave the way in keeping gamers interested in what they have to offer.  If you’re a developer interested in Amazon’s new service, visit their sign-up page.

“We are thrilled to be part of Amazon’s GameCircle with Temple Run,” said Keith Shepherd, Co-founder of Imangi Studios. “The new service is a great way to keep our fans engaged by offering them more opportunities to play the game, and an intuitive platform to connect with new players.”

Another bite in Apple’s a$$

These features sounds all too familiar, right?  Because they are.  We’ve already seen those features on Apple’s Game Center.  Amazon should’ve put multiplayer and invite features so they’d be like Game Center’s twin.

This isn’t the first time Amazon took a bite from what Apple has to offer.  The Kindle Fire, though not as awesome, is their answer to Apple’s iPad.  Then there’s news that their working with Foxconn in creating an iPhone competitor.  Then who could forget Amazon’s Cloud Player app which allows iOS users to stream or download music stored in Cloud Player to their iPhone or iPod touch, play music that is already stored on their device, and manage or create playlists?  Last I heard, that app is just the tip of the iceberg as Amazon is preparing to launch a cloud service that would compete with Apple’s iTunes and iCloud.  Then the Amazon Appstore, though it’s meant for Android devices, if they could offer Apple apps in their store, they would.