The announcement of cloud games streaming service Amazon Luna was sudden, but certainly not unexpected. Rumors that Amazon was about to enter the upcoming cloud gaming war had been swirling for months and surely enough, they came to pass.
Amazon Luna is currently only available in mainland United States and by invitation. Still, Amazon seems to already have very clear ideas on the targeted userbase, as discussed by Product Lead Oliver Messenger in a chat with Gamespot.
For us, one of the things that we are incredibly bullish on is an incredibly low barrier to entry, low friction. And so that's why we can push it. It just works with no specific hardware outside of what you already own with an offering that is priced appropriately.
We're not going after people who are heavily invested in gaming today, we're going after a variable set of people who would love to game; where they hear about these awesome titles beyond mobile gaming, their friends are on TV or they used to game, but they can't justify the expense.
This makes sense when you consider the rather limited options. For example, there's no 4K streaming yet for Amazon Luna, and the hardware itself is less powerful on paper than that of Google Stadia as it features an NVIDIA T4 GPU whose specs round up at 8.1 TFLOPS, whereas Stadia's custom AMD Vega-based GPU goes up to 10.7 TFLOPS. Of course, Amazon could always upgrade its server infrastructure if need be.
On the other hand, Amazon Luna does have a significantly larger lineup of games at launch compared to Google Stadia and this could make a difference when it comes to early success.
Take a look at the full launch lineup below.
- A Plague Tale: Innocence
- Abzu
- AO Tennis 2
- Aragami
- Blasphemous
- BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle
- Blazing Chrome
- Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night
- Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons
- Castlevania Anniversary Collection
- Contra Anniversary Collection
- Control
- CrossCode
- Deponia Doomsday
- DiRT Rally 2.0
- Everspace
- Furi
- Ghost of a Tale
- Goodbye Deponia
- Grid
- Hard Reset Redux
- Iconoclasts
- Indivisible
- Infinite Minigolf
- Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth
- Lumines Remastered
- Metro Exodus
- Mighty Switch Force! Collection
- Obduction
- Overcooked! 2
- Panzer Dragoon Remake
- Paper Beast
- R-Type Dimensions EX
- Redout: Solar Challenge Edition
- Resident Evil 7
- Rez Infinite
- Rime
- River City Girls
- The Sexy Brutale
- Shadow Tactics
- Shantae and the Pirate’s Curse
- Shantae: Half-Genie Hero – Ultimate Edition
- Shantae: Risky’s Revenge – Director’s Cut
- Sonic Mania Plus
- Star Wars Pinball
- SteamWorld Dig
- SteamWorld Dig 2
- SteamWorld Heist: Ultimate Edition
- SteamWorld Quest
- Super Mega Baseball 3
- The Surge
- The Surge 2
- Synthetik: Legion Rising
- Tacoma
- Tangledeep
- Tennis World Tour 2
- The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III
- Thimbleweed Park
- Valfaris
- Victor Vran: Overkill Edition
- Wonder Boy: The Dragon Trap
- XIII
- Yoku’s Island Express
- Yooka-Laylee
- Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair
- Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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