What I find most exciting is that this finally opens the doors for indie game developers to write games for the big screen.
It is true that Steam was already doing that, but I think the audience of people with a PC plugged to a TV screen in the living room or that owns a Steam box is not as big as what the Fire TV owners might end up being
> this finally opens the doors for indie game developers to write games for the big screen
Sony has had extensive and widely-used support for indie game development for the PlayStation platforms for quite some time.[1]
Microsoft has has had so-so support for indie developers (choice between them essentially acting as your publisher or fending for yourself in the Xbox Live Indie Games wasteland), but they're trying to fix that with ID@Xbox.[2]
Then, of course, there's Ouya, if you're in to that sort of thing.[3] It's an Android platform too.
What I meant to say however (and I apologize for the way I phrased it) is that this is makes it even easier for indie developers to reach a wide audience.
Not only do I expect that it will be fairly easy to port Android Tablet games to the Fire TV, I also think that the strategy of offering a TV box that has a Games marketplace as a bonus feature is a strategy that will allow Fire TVs to sell a lot more than Ouyas.
For what it's worth, OUYA's strategy was literally "let indie game developers write games for the big screen", and they successfully launched that product more than half a year ago.
OUYA has lots and lots of their own problems, but they are the most polished version of the "get indie developers on TV" idea.
Or at least, they were, until today's FireTV launch.
It is true that Steam was already doing that, but I think the audience of people with a PC plugged to a TV screen in the living room or that owns a Steam box is not as big as what the Fire TV owners might end up being