Tuesday, Amazon.com launched a new online store that offers over 600 casual game titles, without physical media being necessary, in a first dip into the digital downloads for games pool.

The company has announced that all the titles available were priced below either $6.99 or $9.99, while older games were positioned at the bottom of that price range.

Moreover, as a promotional method, Amazon.com stated that it was offering three titles for free, gamers having a week to come into their possession, after which period the games are scheduled to return to their usual price.

Two months ago, Amazon purchased Reflexive Entertainment, which is a casual-game service that is currently still marketing titles under its own Digital Rights Management (DRM) regulations.

Amazon’s new service requires that purchased titles be downloaded via a special application that resembles the one needed in order to download music tracks from the company’s MP3 service.

After a user buys a game, when the latter is first launched, it verifies information regarding the purchase, while each title can be played for a period of half an hour as a trial period before it becomes mandatory to buy it so as to be able to play it again.

Amazon’s online game download store is bound to go head-to-head with the services offered by Yahoo Games and Valve’s Steam tool, even though unlike the latter, Amazon’s app has yet to come to expand its title-base to larger AAA titles from major publishers.

For the time being, the service is available to PC users only, yet a version for Apple's Mac is in the works.