Amazon's Gaming Zone is bare, dull, and totally misses the mark

Amazon apparently didn’t get the memo that the metaverse is dead. I mean, how else do you explain its new 3D “Gaming Zone” showroom that looks like what the 1980s thought the future would be?

The Gaming Zone features the tag “beyond” as part of its URL, implying that this is something new or revolutionary. It’s really not.

Instead of organizing games as a series of links on the page, this unnecessarily retro Amazon storefront simply arranges them as 3D objects in a virtual space that you can navigate around.

Amazon

Amazon

Amazon

Is it cool to see virtual posters of Shadow of the Erdtree and Assassin’s Creed Shadows? Sure, I guess, if you don’t have a retailer like Best Buy or GameStop near you…

You can’t really do anything here except turn, walk a few paces, and click to open up the same Amazon product pages you would’ve seen otherwise. Even the “arcade cabinets” are there to buy, not to play.

It feels very much like a “metaverse” project that Amazon had in a drawer, handed off to a developer, and forgot about. What’s the point? Why’d they even make this? Who is it for? We’ll never know…

Author: Mark Hachman, Senior Editor, PCWorld

Mark has written for PCWorld for the last decade, with 30 years of experience covering technology. He has authored over 3,500 articles for PCWorld alone, covering PC microprocessors, peripherals, and Microsoft Windows, among other topics. Mark has written for publications including PC Magazine, Byte, eWEEK, Popular Science and Electronic Buyers’ News, where he shared a Jesse H. Neal Award for breaking news. He recently handed over a collection of several dozen Thunderbolt docks and USB-C hubs because his office simply has no more room.

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