Amazon is putting the Luna streaming service inside its Prime Video program, hoping people will finally see it – GeekWire
Amazon announced today that it has updated some versions of its Prime Video program to include direct access to its cloud-based Luna streaming service.
The mission of the business is to solve Luna’s problem of awareness and bringing new users to the platform. Many prime members do not know that the gaming service is included in their membership.
Consumers in the US and UK who don’t have both a Prime and Fire TV subscription can now launch Luna directly from the Prime Video app, where it can be found in its dedicated UI tab. Premium subscribers who launch Luna on the app will get direct access to a library of rare and classic “AAA” video games at no additional cost and without leaving the app.
“In fact, we relaunched last October, taking a lot of the value of Luna that was behind the paywall… We pushed it into Prime membership, as a way to provide more value and try to grow our business,” Jeff Gattis, GM of sports at Amazon, told GeekWire.
Players on Luna can stream an assortment of games to their TV or browser via Amazon’s cloud servers, using a smartphone as a controller if they don’t have a compatible gamepad. Luna’s current library ranges from well-known classic hits such as these Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Shipping, again Fallout 4 on a variety of specialty titles such as Amazon’s Chaos in the Court.
Since the relaunch, Gattis said, the company has “5x the base” of its players.
“Our question is, how do you do on top of that?” he said. “How do we let the 200 million Prime members around the world know that they have this great deal where you can play $70 worth of games within your Prime membership at no extra cost? [Luna] the benefit is there.”
While Luna was previously available to Prime subscribers through a web browser and a few other smart TV brands, it was a standalone service that required users to search for it themselves. By moving it to its own tab in the Prime Video app, Amazon’s hope is to raise awareness that Luna exists at all.
“It’s going to start on Fire TV, but obviously our ultimate goal is to stream to multiple countries and multiple devices, both third-party and third-party,” Gattis said. “Eventually we’ll be everywhere Prime Video is.”
A Luna and Prime tie-in could also bring back the much-forsaken trend of video game movie tie-ins. Fans of this summer Masters of the Universe reboot can watch a movie on Prime Video, then switch to Luna to play it Masters of the Universe: Legends Meetis a deck-building strategy game currently only available on Luna. This kind of transmedia synergy used to be part of every big summer action movie, but it’s been falling by the wayside since the 2010s.
Luna started being paid in 2020 as a subscription-based cloud service. Subscribers can pay a monthly fee to access more than 100 video games, which they can play through their browser by streaming them from Amazon’s servers.
At the time, Luna was Amazon’s entry into what was becoming a publisher-driven “war of the cloud,” with companies like Google and Nvidia all launching their own game streaming services. Over time, however, the cloud’s impact on sports has not lived up to its initial hype.
Recently, the decline in the segment has increased the price of consoles and graphics cards, and that plays into Amazon’s bet on Luna.
Gattis said the cloud was “a technology ahead of its time,” in part because the industry targeted it at the wrong people, positioning it as a direct replacement for gaming consoles and PCs.
“That is very difficult to ask someone like me,” he said. “I invested emotionally and financially in my Series X console and my 5090 graphics card. I’m happy.”
Amazon caters to everyone: gamers who can’t afford a current-generation gaming PC or console, let alone the next generation of gaming hardware at sky-high prices. For the first time, Gattis said, “there are a lot of people who will think of the cloud as a viable alternative to $1,500 hardware.”
