Amazon Luna - Another Cloud Gaming Service
Monday 28th September 2020, 06:48 | written by: Gabriel SciberrasIn the videogame industry, the summer of 2020 has offered multiple trends - local and online party games such as Fall Guys and Among Us, Call of Duty Warzone and also, the gaming industry's fixation on cloud gaming. Here on the site, we've covered the ongoing narrative and comparisons between Google Stadia, Project xCloud from Microsoft, Playstation Now and of course, Nvidia GeForce Now. It looks like Amazon wishes to join the race.
Indeed, Amazon wishes to dive into the very small ball pit which is already quite crowded with their upcoming product of Amazon Luna. So, what's so special about this cloud gaming experience and how does it compare to the other ones which look to hit or are already on the market?
Supposedly, the service will offer 'all-you-can-play' access to games via a channel system. In this manner, users may subscribe to certain channels which from what we can tell, will offer a certain quality of games. Only two channels have been confirmed so far, namely Luna Plus, which will house first-party games from Amazon and other services and another rumoured for Ubisoft games.
With pricing starting at $5.99 a month, with an optional $49.99 Luna Controller for Luna early access users only at the time being. The cloud gaming service will be available on PC, Mac, Fire TV, iPhone and iPad. Note that Amazon here looks to do well with the Apple ecosystem, unlike others. With reference to the game library, it's confirmed that 50 games will be on Luna Plus and Ubisoft channels.
An advantage Amazon has is running everything on Windows servers with Nvidia GPUs, so developers don't have to design games specifically for the service - a downfall behind the failure of Google Stadia.
So will it do well? Honestly, I've got no idea. This whole market of cloud gaming is so primitive at the moment, it's confusing to me. While this may be the future, it's definitely not the present.
Let us know what you think of this industry craze behind cloud gaming in the comments section below! Do any of the products stand out from the other?