Some gamers still grieve thedemise of Google Stadia, their memories of the platform marred by neither its sloppy launch nor unceremonious funeral. Remaining cloud gaming factions from Sony, Microsoft, and Nvidia continue to spar with each other, while working on strategies to seize as much of the market as possible. Amidst the fray, this weekAmazon Lunais expanding its cloud gaming platform to owners of recent LG smart TVs.
Luna will nowstart appearing on the home screenof 2023 LG TVs, and be available as a downloadable app on 2021 and 2022 LG models. The streaming service will be available to owners of these screens in the US, Canada, Germany, and the UK. This expansion to LG marks the second partnership with a smart TV company Amazon has fostered this year after analmost identical deal with Samsung.
Amazon Prime users who jump to Lunastart with access to a small, rotating set of titles. The Luna platform also grants users the ability to claim cloud access and start streaming select games they’ve previously purchased.
Users have the option to add access to additional gaming content for extra monthly fees: Ubisoft games, Jackbox games, retro game packs, etc. Practically, you may sort of think of them as channels on Amazon Prime — horror fans can augment their basic plan with Shudder — it’s like that, except for video games.
As a streaming service, Luna leans heavily on Amazon’s existing cloud-processing brawn. The company runs the single largest portion of the cloud-computing infrastructure universe, with Amazon Web Services handling about 32% of the cloud computing market. That makes it about the same size as Microsoft’s and Google’s presence in this area combined. And Amazon’s processing muscle sure seems to translate to a smooth user experience.Our own 2022 review of the Luna platformrates it highly in this regard.
If there’s one place where Amazon’s cloud gaming presence feels less secure, though, it would have to be the core intellectual property — thegames.It sounds impressive when the platform boasts access to 177 titles, but this also means it lost about 20 somewhere along the way. Ubisoft, the premiere publisher in Luna’s AAA game portfolio, is currently negotiating its own cloud gaming future within the pending Microsoft Blizzard-Activision merger. Microsoft wants to sell its cloud gaming operation to Ubisoft, but how or whether such a transaction would impact Ubisoft’s relationship with Amazon remains unclear. For the moment, at least, we’re sticking with Luna — at least until Amazon pullSmurfs: Operation Vileafout of rotation.
