The launch of Amazon Luna is now official. Amazon revealed its own cloud gaming service in late 2020, and now, it’s finally available to Amazon Prime users in the United States. The company has confirmed the launch of the service for Android, iOS, Chrome OS, macOS and Windows.
Although Amazon Luna is not very different from Google Stadia, Nvidia GeForce Now or any other cloud gaming platform, basing its service on streaming games from high-end servers — allowing us not to depend on our hardware to play and what we notice a notable difference is in its subscription structure.
For comparison, Stadia has a free tier with basic service and a premium subscription with additional features like 4K. Both have access to a library of free games, which rotate on a monthly basis. There is also a larger collection of games that users can purchase just like they would on Steam or any other digital store. Purchased games can be streamed whenever the subscriber wants.
For its part, Amazon Luna offers a variety of smaller libraries that it calls “channels”, each with different subscription rates, seeking that users can “build” their own on-demand service according to their tastes and needs. While its free subscription offers only a small selection of games from the rest of the subscription plans, it is only for a limited time, limiting access to games to small availability windows of about a couple of weeks.
- Luna+, available from $5.99 per month, the basic plan currently includes 115 games such as Control, Grey, No More Heroes, Blasphemous, Carrion, The Surge 2, Devil May Cry 5, Bloodstained, Mortal Shell, A Plague Tale: Innocence, The Medium, Yakuza: Like a Dragon, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Ghostrunner and DiRT 2.0. Titles run at 1080p/60 FPS.
- Family, available for just $2.99 per month, based on the inclusion of a smaller game catalogue focused on 44 titles for all audiences, such as Skatebird, Snake Pass or Overcooked.
- Ubisoft+, going up to $17.99 per month, will give us access to all Ubisoft games, including new releases and current titles like Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, Far Cry 6 or Immortals Fenyx Rising, among others.
- Retro Channel, available for $4.99 per month, bills itself as a channel dedicated to classic games that includes 46 titles such as Street Fighter II – Hyper Fighting, Metal Slug 3 and Castlevania Anniversary Collection.
- Jackbox Games, available for $4.99 per month, exclusively focused on the title selection of these multiplayer party game bundles.
Also, if you don’t have a game controller available — Amazon sells its own Luna Controller — the platform allows you to use an Android phone or iPhone as a game controller when playing from a Fire TV device.
Now it remains to be seen if Amazon ends up launching the service outside the United States, something for which there is currently no data.
