My hot take on Amazon Luna - it could flop harder than Stadia

So I'd consider myself pretty into Amazon stuff. I'm not the most hardcore of devotees but I have an old Kindle Fire Tablet, a Fire TV box and a Fire TV stick I had before the box, my father has a Kindle E-reader and based on my recommendations over the years he now has 2 Amazon Fire Tablets and my mother also has an Amazon Fire Tablet. So that shows I have some level of affinity toward them.

I previously talked about Amazon's sort of first faltering attempts to get into gaming with the Fire TV game controller before and put a stop to some of the rumours going round at the time about Amazon's cloud gaming system having supposedly seen the controller leak.

With all this said my take on it from the outside looking at what has been announced so far is that I'm actually kind of disappointed in the offering. I think Luna might end up as much of a flop as Google Stadia unless Amazon makes some changes. I'm pointing this stuff out at this early stage because I can spot some of the issues and the potential of this thing already.

So the problems:

One of the things I used to do because I had Amazon to see what they were putting out was buy the seasons of the show. Amazon used to let people just outright buy the stuff to stream when they wanted and I thought that was actually pretty good as it gave people options. Now Amazon does still allow sales of Blu Ray and DVDs of its series for a number of them but they have steered away from what I'd have said was a good pro consumer thing before. Luna is going up against Xcloud and Xbox Game Pass and also Google Stadia. Game Pass Ultimate lets people buy games and then play them on the relevant Xbox console so if they like a game they can own it. Google Stadia has a free tier and will let people buy their games outright to stream and play. Luna looks to be a service that is subscription only so if you want to keep playing certain game you have keep subscribing you can't seemingly just buy it outright and keep playing once you're not a subscriber. That seems like a big negative point for Luna from the start.

The next issue is the service will do something Amazon themselves have been doing with prime and offering additional channels you can pay more to sub to on top. Compared to Xcloud and Game Pass ultimate which will be giving people a library of games for $15.99 a month and Luna's early access price is going to be $5.99 likely going up to at least $10.99 out of early access. Depending on the costs for the additional channels and the way the games industry has been going I entirely expect many AAA companies to want their own channel not to be integrated into the Luna main library it could end up being more costly than its rivals.

Amazon touts how Luna will let you go from watching a twitch stream to jumping into game instantly to play it but again that entirely depends on if the game is in the Luna channel or if the game ends up as an additional subscription in some other publishers channel on the Luna system so the whole jump in feature could have issues there too.

The possibility for Amazon to do something with Luna is there. Tie Luna into Prime gaming and giving people maybe 1 small game a month to keep on Luna would likely potentially be huge. Offering a Stadia style free tier maybe to Prime gaming people would also be fairly huge even if that doesn't mean access to any games other than those owned in peoples Twitch games library or something. Luna could be integrated so well into Amazon's existing things and yet it seems like Amazon is just holding Luna at arms length at the moment trying to keep it away from other stuff as much as possible and feels like it's trying to do the bare minimum to try and look like level competition with others. I expected more from Amazon and if Google ever finally rolls out all the stuff Stadia was meant to have then I have to say the Google Stadia jokes and memes will quickly turn to Amazon Luna jokes as the service could be left in the dust even by Google's service.

Luna from Paladins