After a period of five years, Marc Whitten – the man responsible for Fire TV, the Kindle and more – has stepped down as Amazon’s VP of entertainment and services. The news of Whitten’s departure was noticed by a consultant yesterday Matthew Ball on Twitter (via The edge), and Whitten himself said in a subsequent tweet that he is now “just digging” as SVP and GM of the game engine maker Unity’s Create division.
As it turns out, however, Whitten left in favor of Unity a few weeks ago. CEO John Riccitiello confirmed that the former Amazon CEO joined the company during the Q4 earnings call, calling him an ‘incredible leader in the world of technology and entertainment’, pointing out that the company has so many projects in the works, and Whitten on board is meant to help Unity ‘map out and make sure the opportunity arises.’
Prior to his tenure at Amazon, Whitten was chief product officer at Sonos, where he helped lead Trueplay and the well-rated Speaker: 5 speaker on the market. And before that, Whitten had been with Microsoft for more than a decade, overseeing the launches of three-generation Xbox and Xbox Live. His hands were probably the best at Amazon, but he effectively oversaw all of the company’s hardware efforts, along with a growing range of services.
Case in point: Whitten recently oversaw Amazon Luna, the on-demand streaming gaming service that has been slowly expanding on PCs, Macs, iOS, Android and – as of yesterday – all Fire TV devices. That’s enough to give Luna one of the biggest footprints of any cloud gaming platform available in the US, and the good news for Amazon does not end there. Google’s decision to kill first-party Stadia studios is a justification for Amazon’s focus on providing access to existing games from partners like Ubisoft, rather than developing its own Luna-exclusive titles. This is not a bad remark to keep going, all things considered.