Over the last several years, Amazon has expanded its platform to incredible new horizons. In addition to online shopping, Amazon has created various other outlets for its Prime users to enjoy, such as video streaming, music streaming, free e-books, and even grocery shopping. Though, as of today, Amazon has now aimed its sights at the world of video game streaming.
For the longest time now, Amazon and gaming have somewhat gone hand in hand. More and more people have been using Amazon and other online retail outlets to purchase physical copies of games for several years now. In fact, Super Mario 3D All-Stars sold out on Amazon within a week of its initial announcement. Although, now gaming enthusiasts will now be able to enjoy video games through Amazon without actually having to buy physical copies.
During its hardware event, it was announced that Amazon will be launching a cloud gaming platform called Luna. This platform will be in a similar vein to Google Stadia, as it will give players a wide selection of games to stream for a monthly subscription. The exact price of the subscription is starting at $5.99 a month.
While an official launch date was not revealed during the event, Amazon did reveal that the service will include over 100 games at its initial launch. This will include titles like Control, Resident Evil 7, and Abzu, just to name a select few. This is in extremely high contrast to Google Stadia, which had only a little over 20 titles when the platform initially launched back in November of last year.
Luna also comes with an Alexa integrated controller that will be made available for $49.99 during the early access period. In addition, Luna also features Twitch integration, letting players watch Twitch clips of people playing whatever game the user might be looking at. Perhaps this is to give users an idea of what the game will be like before playing, though that might be more of a hindrance, considering that some of the Twitch clips could contain spoilers if the game focuses a lot on story.
Ultimately, based on what has been shown so far, Luna looks like it has a lot of potential, but consumers should be wary, considering that admittedly, Google Stadia had a number of growing pains during its initial launch. In fact, when it first released, Stadia was missing a lot of key features that were initially promised at launch. Only time will tell if Luna manages to live up to the expectations of consumers.
Amazon Luna is currently in development.
Source: The Verge