Amazon has unveiled the Mac Downloads Store, a direct competitor to Apple’s Mac App Store.

The new Mac Downloads Store is essentially a marketplace for buying and downloading Mac applications. Amazon has sold software downloads for years, but now it those software downloads have been organized into a one-stop shop.

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The biggest difference between the two stores is that Amazon’s store isn’t available as a desktop application. That means you can’t receive easy updates from the Mac Download Store, and because it’s not always present on the desktop, users might forget about visiting Amazon’s store on a regular basis. Amazon’s store also has a much smaller selection of titles — around 250 or so. Approximately 50 of those titles are games, which are actually part of a subsection of the Mac Download Store.

Amazon’s store includes a few titles not on Apple’s roster, the most prominent one being Microsoft’s Office for Mac 2011, which retails for $202.96 for the business version and $115 for the home and student version. Microsoft is currently “looking at” the possibility of Office on the Mac App Store, though we doubt Microsoft is willing to pay Apple 30% of its Office for Mac revenue.

The Mac Download Store is Amazon’s third application store after the Kindle App Store and the Amazon Appstore for Android. The latter has given Amazon some legal headaches; Apple has sued Amazon over its use of the term “Appstore,” claiming that it infringes upon its “App Store” trademark.