This is certainly awful for anyone trying to develop a game outside of Amazon while they work at Amazon. But one has to stop and ask, is that really a thing?
If you worked for Coca-Cola, would it be ok to develop a soda that's not theirs? This is an age old HR problem called work for hire. Amazon is ensuring that any work you do on video games while you work there is theirs. In other words, it's work for hire whether you do it at home or not because Amazon is in the video game business.
Same goes for working with the other guys. Would Coke be ok with you moonlighting on a Pepsi product? They aren't.
The hot word here is that either you work for yourself or you work for someone else. Not both in the same industry simultaneously.
Yet if you work in a warehouse, this policy apparently (from other commentators) applies to you too.
I run the servers for an open source multiplayer video game, one of our frequent contributors used to work in the shipping mines at amazon. So I'd say it's an issue. Also one of our maps had a lot of work on it done by a bioware employee in map design who also created one of the valve sponsored community maps for tf2 (cp_coldfront).
The difference between the soda example and the computers example, is that people who do tech work tend to have tech hobbies. Nobody who is a chemist at coke is going to have a hobby creating and random releasing drink recipes on the internet in their spare time.
Anti-moonlighting clauses also fail to take into account one thing: If your employer is attempting to control all hours of your life, they should not be allowed to pay less then min wage for those hours. a $125k salary is still less then Seattle's Minimum Wage when you extrapolate it to all 168 hours in a day that amazon apparently wants to be able to control. ($14.30/h).
Actually, many famous food products, software products, cars, and other things were created by people who did work at their former competitors. It's been the subject of many lawsuits. Reese's were invented by a disgruntled employee at Hershey.
No one has ever tried to control all of anyone's hours. All of my arguments are about the nature of the work and the intellectual property components it carries. If you are hauling boxes for Amazon or hauling boxes for Coke, none of this is relevant.
> No one has ever tried to control all of anyone's hours.
If my employer says I can not do something in my spare time, then they are controlling all of my hours, and they should be paying me for all of my hours.
That's just not how salaried positions work. Shift positions, sure, but you won't find any kind of professional job where you're off the hook when you're off the clock.
There are always expectations and rules about your conduct out of work. Some it is political (you can't be in crazy public political groups), some of it is legal (you can't doing illegal stuff), and some of it is about business (non compete, IP rules, etc).
Once again, this is all one of the best reasons to work for yourself! When you work for someone else, they do get to set some of the rules -- for all of your life. Them's the breaks!
If you worked for Coca-Cola, would it be ok to develop a soda that's not theirs? This is an age old HR problem called work for hire. Amazon is ensuring that any work you do on video games while you work there is theirs. In other words, it's work for hire whether you do it at home or not because Amazon is in the video game business.
Same goes for working with the other guys. Would Coke be ok with you moonlighting on a Pepsi product? They aren't.
The hot word here is that either you work for yourself or you work for someone else. Not both in the same industry simultaneously.