Amazon has announced that starting today, customers in the U.S. can request early access to Amazon Luna; a new cloud gaming service designed for instant play. As the press release reads, with Luna and the scale and capability of Amazon Web Services (AWS), it’s easy to stream high-quality, immersive games.
Players can enjoy Luna games on their favorite devices without lengthy downloads or updates, expensive hardware or complicated configuration. They can even start playing on one screen and seamlessly pick up and continue on another. At launch, Luna will be available on Fire TV, PC, and Mac as well as on web apps for iPhone and iPad, with Android coming soon.
Marc Whitten, Vice President, Amazon Entertainment Devices and Services, said:
“We created Luna to make it easy to play great games on the devices customers already own and love. It’s Day One for Luna—we are excited to work with gamers, streamers, and publishers like Ubisoft and Remedy Entertainment to build a great gaming experience for everyone.”
Players can subscribe to the Luna+ game channel, which offers a growing library of games to play on Fire TV, PC, and Mac, or through web apps on iOS, with Android coming soon. During early access, Luna+ will include action games like Resident Evil 7, Control, and Panzer Dragoon; adventure games like A Plague Tale: Innocence and The Surge 2; platformers like Yooka-Laylee and The Impossible Lair and Iconoclasts; and fan favorites like GRID, ABZU and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. Luna+ will be offered at an introductory price of $5.99/month during the early access period, with more titles to be added over time. Additionally, Luna+ subscribers can play on two devices simultaneously and get resolutions of 4K/60fps for select titles.
Amazon also announced a new gaming channel with leading global video game publisher Ubisoft, available directly through Luna. Players who subscribe to this channel will have access to their favorite Ubisoft titles in up to 4K resolution, mobile gameplay, and access to new titles when the channel launches like Assassins Creed Valhalla, Far Cry 6, and Immortals Fenyx Rising the same day they release. This is the first of multiple Luna game channels in development, where customers can play games from their favorite publishers and genres.
Chris Early, SVP of Partnerships and Revenue, Ubisoft, added:
“We’re proud to be working alongside Amazon on Luna, utilizing the power of cloud gaming to provide our players with another way to access our games, wherever they are. Ubisoft’s channel on Luna will allow players to experience our new releases along with many of our catalog games, while enjoying player-friendly features like Alexa and Twitch integrations.”
Customers can play Luna with a keyboard and mouse, a Bluetooth game controller, or the new Luna Controller with Cloud Direct technology. Luna Controller is Alexa-enabled and connects directly to the cloud to effortlessly control your game, featuring a multiple-antenna design that prioritizes un-interrupted wifi for lower latency gaming. In fact, our testing showed a reduction in roundtrip latency when playing Luna Controller with Cloud Direct vs. Luna Controller via Bluetooth, with reductions of between 17 to 30 milliseconds among PC, Fire TV, and Mac. Because the Luna Controller connects directly to cloud servers, players can easily switch between screens—such as Fire TV to mobile phone—without additional pairing or configuration changes. Luna Controller is available at an introductory price of $49.99 during the early access period.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
Contact: Email
When it comes to gaming, Amazon never had a single smart idea
They’re making the entire PvPvE genre look bad so it’s good in my book.
The less of that crap, the better
Amazon is a piece of trash. Period. It is a cancer for humanity.
I never buy anything from it.
Google is better at streaming than Amazon/Twitch and even they couldn’t make it work. This thing is dead on arrival. Twitch clearly tries to stream video from the US to Europe at night and ISPs get in the way of that and throttle them so you can’t watch anything on Twitch on some nights, especially on weekends. So apparently Amazon do not have a reliable connection from the US to Europe or not enough servers in Europe. Meanwhile for game streaming you’d need servers in Europe that run the games and stream them with low latency to European cities. I don’t see this Luna thing lasting a week before its first several-hours long complete meltdown.
Luna? For lunatics? ??
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this picture made me sad a little bit.
WHY?
Seriously, why?
cloud gaming is the future
The earth is flat
Bwahaha. Equal logic to “cloud gaming is the future”, that’s for sure.
Yeah sure!
Looks like someone is trying to build ammunition for a potential anti trust case
Right. This is why people spend thousands of dollars on CPU/RAM/GPU, because they want to stream garbage, compressed video over some trash “streaming” system. LOL I don’t know who actually plays on these crap systems and thinks, “Ya, this is great!”
I’ve tried them all, and at least to me, they are all terrible. Between the crappy visuals, and the input lag, I could never, ever, get onboard with streaming junk.
SO LAME!
Each time an article mentions cloud gaming, floodgates of tears, anger and angst fill up the page.
Not everyone has the money to buy a $1,000 gaming PC, but plenty of people have access to good internet nowadays.
If you don’t understand the appeal of cloud gaming, you probably also didn’t see Netflix coming.
“but what about the lagggg!!!”
Please, when people started playing online, LAN players claimed online play would never take off either due to the ‘lag!!!’. Most people are not competitive players and couldn’t give a damn about tiny millisecond differences in response. If anything cloud gaming could cut down on the lag due to Amazon servers being much closer than most vanilla game servers.
“If you don’t understand the appeal of cloud gaming, you probably also didn’t see Netflix coming.
“but what about the lagggg!!!”
Yup, because watching a movie or tv show, is the same as trying to interact with a game, at internet latency. Great comparison.
Netflix is also not without compromises, Netflix 4k is not the same as a Blu Ray 4k. Netflix sometimes buffers. You don’t own a Netflix show.
But you know what, Netflix became a massive success, because it is convenient.
You know what is not convenient?
-buying an expensive gaming PC
-spending 4 hours downloading a game + patches
-installing games
-removing and reinstalling games because your SSD is full
-messing with drivers (you having fun AMD GPU owners there?)
-cheaters ruining the experience when the game is finally running
these are just the a few of the problems cloud gaming solves
Is cloud gaming perfect? NO. If you’re one of those 14-year-old ‘ELITE’ Fortnite e-sports players then cloud gaming is not for you, but for normal gamers, it is a great option.
People do not buy an expensive computer just for games, it is true that there are exceptions, but the majority buy a PC for doing other things besides playing games.
By the way, for playing 1080P 144HZ you do not need an expensive PC, I prefer 1080P 144HZ over all 4K bullshit every day.
Stream gaming services will not be consistent and each service will have its own exclusive games,
So what did we do about it? We will purchase a subscription to all gaming services and we have already passed the price of a PC or console, and I did not take into account the technological limitations of the service.
It’s not my problem that you are poor, don’t try to justify it by saying that building a PC is not convenient just because is too much for you.
All those “not conveniences” you listed i would understand coming from somebody that had no experience with PC’s, ever or is just dumb tech wise.
cloud gaming is completely platform agnostic
that’s the whole point of cloud gaming, to leverage server infrastructue to relieve the client
You know what is not convenient?
– Not being able to play anymore because game is removed this month.
– Having constant lag.
– Not being able to play if you don’t live in a big city.
– Not being able to play if you don’t live in select 10 countries out of 200.
***Is cloud gaming perfect? NO. If you’re one of those 14-year-old ‘ELITE’ Fortnite e-sports players then cloud gaming is not for you, but for normal gamers, it is a great option.***
Vice versa. Cloud gaming is only good for multiplayer live service games like fortnite. For normal gamers cloud is total s**t.
it is convenient for some people for sure, just like mobile games and the such. not sure how well it will pick up though
you are so terrible at math and finance, are you american or are you a teenager?
yes….$1000 gaming PC and $70 games are such a bargain compared to a $5 streaming service
the main reason for cloud gaming’s increasing popularity is because overpriced gaming PC are ‘Bad Finance‘
I honestly don’t understand why you are receiving so much pushback on defending the idea of a streaming service.
Half of my country’s population, USA, can’t afford a $400 emergency, so I certainly see the potential and allure of cloud gaming. Especially considering most people have internet at their homes and a platform to play the games on.
Cloud gaming still has a long way to go before it’s 100% practical, though. In my own experience, I’ve had issues using the PSNow service whenever I use anything other than direct ethernet connection.
not to mention you’d end up paying more for your subscription than buying a pc.
Most streaming services are around $10 a month.
$120 a year.
A 4k gaming PC costs at least $1200…and you still need to start buying games them.
For $1200 you can pay for 10 years of cloud gaming.
terrible terrible assessment, this is exactly why you’re poor. if you’re young i can understand otherwise i recommend reading these two books :
scarcity: why having too little means so much
black swan book by nicholas taleb
hundreds????
the requirement for this Amazon service is 10Mbit/s…in what cesspool of a country do you live that you pay ‘hundreds’ for basic internet…10Mbit/s costs $10 here
what kind of argument is yours?
if you can’t afford 10Mbit/s internet, you probably can’t even afford the electricity to run a PC
the way you go on about things in life, i put my neck on it, you will not get anywhere in your life, read the books i recommended.
hopefully you get banned for that racist comment
banned by Disqus, racism can be reported to Disqus and your account is under review
I wouldn’t waste my breath, tbh.
I love the performance assessments and PC-focused gaming perspective on this site, but around 60% of the commenters here are the absolute dregs of society.
“..we are witnessing the death of gaming as passion.”
I’d say that death was suffered long ago. This is just insult to injury at this point.
/yawn Oh, is it time for another negligible streaming disservice? Cool.
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Good. Maybe gaming needs to die so it can be reborn again free of pozz and predatory practices.
It’s dieing because of the predatory practices. What kind of logic is this?
Oh sh*te…….
2 things these big corporations are trying to shove down gamer’s throats are – Cloud based gaming and VR…they have been failing at VR since the 90…CBG is going to be on that failure list too.
Hmm, Remedy are looking rather desperate. First they aligned with Microsoft for various exclusivity deals. Then they took money from Epic Games to bankroll a couple of EGS exclusives in exchange for 50% of the profits. Now they’re jumping aboard the Amazon money train.
F*ck Amazon and mostly, F*CK JEFF BEZOS piece of TRASH, I hope he will die soon in extreme suffering, filthy human rot…….
It’s Over… Just Look…
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Satanism all over the place… Seriously WTF!?
Satanism?
This game is a dream for the LGBT/SJW people.
It appears to be so.
Is that a combination of the Puerto Rican flag and The United States Flag?
Instead of attacking cloud gaming services, realise that cloud gaming solves a problem that was created by hardware manufacturers themselves.
If gaming PC didn’t cost so much money, cloud gaming would not even be talked about, it would be irrelevant because everyone could afford to game.
The fact is, that most people are UNWILLING to pay a $1,000+ upfront cost for a gaming PC. Many just want to game from whatever device they already spent money on without having to ‘UPGRADE’ every couple of years to keep up with the Joneses.
Cloud gaming a is a solution to a problem hardware manufacturers created.
– You don’t own the game, you don’t have it on your end, you can’t mod files.
– Companies can monitor what you’re doing in the game so if you create white male character (for example) in all RPGs you can be banned for “hate speech” and that’s a reality today.
– Companies can push SJW bulls**t like NLM while you playing or cut your game for 2 hours because “BLM cause”.
Wait you have to pay for subscription and pay for the game ? Didn’t stadia already told you this would not work ? Double payments will not go well.
The end of ownership is coming
you haven’t owned a game since DRM was introduced
once that DRM server shuts down, goodbye games
all older games that rely on SecuROM no longer install
but if you want to spend $70 on every game and lie to yourself that you will still be able to install that game 10 years from now, no one is stopping you
Except I buy everything I can from gog.com and those are really drm free. The rest I pirate