Amazon In The Money?

Amazon to Bring in Virtual Currency

Amazon introduces virtual currency which could be used for purchases on the Kindle Fire tablet. The experts believe that the idea is to encourage more developers to create software for the device.

From May 2013, American customers will be able to use Amazon Coins to purchase software and virtual merchandise sold within games. Amazon is going to “print” tens of millions of dollars worth of the virtual currency, which will be accepted in its app store.

The experts believe that this move is part of a cunning plan to get users to play with Fire applications and force more developers to write software for it. The reason is that the company’s share of the tablet market has dropped to 12% from 16%.

Using the virtual money, plan developers will still get the 70% revenue share from purchases made with the coins. The online bookseller also announced that after the coin giveaway ends, the users will be able to buy the tokens through their Amazon accounts. The retailer explained that Amazon Coins was meant to be an easy way for Kindle Fire customers to spend money in the Amazon Appstore. The company issued a statement, saying that it provided app and game developers another great opportunity to drive traffic, downloads and increase monetization.

The company has already released tools which allow developers add extra features to games for its tablet. The features included tracking high scores and monitoring awards won during play.

Of course, Amazon has a long way to go before it catches up with such market giants as Apple and Android. The retailer currently has over 68,000 apps in its store, compared with 4,000 when it was launched two years ago. In the meanwhile, Google and Apple have about 700,000 apps each in their stores.