Everyone wants the next Game of Thrones basically. Sword Art Online got snapped up for an American TV remake too. If they take liberties with that it would fit the bill too: lots of cute girls, adventures, drama and death. And for good or ill, they'll probably stretch out the first arc of SAO to basically be 60 episodes an hour long instead of 13 x 25 minutes. By switching the focus to
multiple side-characters then they could in fact pad that into an ensemble show pretty easily. They'd have to do a complete rewrite however to make this really work*.
*
its potential live-action series will follow "a brilliant young beta tester Kirito and his group of friends when they are trapped — alongside 10,000 other people — in a next-generation virtual reality online role-playing game. The game is a world unto itself: filled with sword fighting, monsters, magic and mystery, where the stakes are life and death. Kirito and an ensemble of diverse characters must fight their way through this hostile environment while making lives for themselves in the fantastical world that is Sword Art Online.
yeah "diverse group of friends" is not in the original SAO plot at all, basically. They're re-imagining this as an ensemble show.
It's similar to how there were a bunch of glossy-filmed "mysterious" shows after Lost became a big hit. The guy who greenlit Lost ended up being pushed out for being too risky (the opening was at the time, the most expensive opening episode of all time), however everyone then copied the "feel" with shows like e.g. "Heroes" a couple of years later: basically shows that ask more questions than it answers, and have many, many interweaving character narratives, so they leave you wondering how and when all the threads will join together. That's what Lost gave TV.
So, it's copy-cat time for GoT now. I wouldn't be too optimistic about Amazon putting this out. And I wouldn't be surprised if there's an arms-race here to get these things into production quicker than the next guy to try and tap into the "GoT" market as soon as that's over.