Luna, Amazon’s cloud gaming service, is finally making its debut in France. Accessible at no additional cost for Prime subscribers, it also offers several paid plans. How to compete with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate?
Amazon is launching into the cloud gaming sector, alongside Xbox Game Pass, PS Plus Premium and Nvidia GeForce New with its own service, called Luna, which finally arrived in France on November 15. Presented in 2020 and slowly deployed in a few rare countries, the new kid was eagerly awaited! Free for Amazon Prime subscribers, it offers a catalog of titles playable in the cloud on many platforms. To put it simply, the player can start a game on their TV and continue it on their smartphone! Some titles are offered at no extra cost – and this is its advantage over its competitors – but you have to go to the checkout to expand the catalog, which includes AAA blockbusters as well as independent and retro games that reek of nostalgia. Hoping that Luna will not suffer the same fate as the late Stadia!
Amazon Luna: what games in the catalog?
Luna works through a “base”, included in Amazon Prime, and paid subscription blocks – a bit like Prime Video with the Warner and Ligue 1 passes. First of all, the service offers a free selection for Prime subscribers, accessible at no additional cost – at €6.99 per month or €69.99 per year therefore. It includes around ten titles which rotate every month. Currently, players can enjoy FortniteofEncodeya or even Trackmania. Note that Luna offers several nice functions, such as the possibility of linking your Ubisoft, Epic Games, Discord and Twitch accounts to the service.
To benefit from a larger catalog in cloud gaming, it is possible to subscribe to Luna+ for €9.99 per month – in addition to the Amazon Prime subscription –, with a seven-day trial period. The catalog currently contains 99 titles, including Team Sonic Racing, Spongebob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom, Batman: Arkham Knight, Devil May Cry 5 or Control – unfortunately, none are really recent. Each month, Amazon will add games to its catalog, so as to vary the content. You can also subscribe to Jackbox games, for €4.99 per month, in order to access around ten games like party gamesuch as Quiplash, Murder Party Trivia And Drawful.
For fans of triple A games, Luna offers to subscribe to Ubisoft+ – still in the cloud – for €17.99 per month. Players can thus enjoy around 45 of the studio’s most iconic titles (Child of Light, Assassin’s Creed, Watch Dogs, Far Cry…), including his most recent blockbusters (Assassin’s Creed Mirage, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora…). Note that if the user already owns certain Ubisoft PC games, they can add them to the Luna library and enjoy them in cloud gaming for free.
Luna is available on PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, Android smartphones and tablets, Fire TV sticks and Samsung and LG connected TVs. To take advantage of it, simply go through a browser and go to the site Luna.Amazon.fr, or download the Luna application. There is no need to download the games on the device to enjoy them, you can play them instantly. The device calculates nothing, or almost nothing, and “just” displays images of the game calculated remotely by specialized servers, and sent in real time. To simplify, the device used only serves as a screen and control device. All heavy processing, which requires powerful processors, particularly for rendering graphics, is carried out remotely on the servers. To enjoy cloud gaming with Luna, all you need is a fast Internet connection, a screen and a controller. HAS note that it is possible to play with touch controls on a smartphone and then transform the latter into a controller for other media.
Speaking of controllers, it is also possible, according to the Amazon site, to use a DualShock PS4, an Xbox One controller or a keyboard-mouse system. On the other hand, the DualSense PS5 and the latest Xbox Series controllers do not seem compatible for the moment. Amazon also decided to market its own controller, as Google did with Stadia at the time. The e-commerce giant therefore offers to play with the optimized Luna controller, which connects to cloud servers via Wi-Fi, in order to reduce latency. It is sold at the introductory price of €39.99 until November 27, then increases to €69.99.
Amazon Luna: what’s the point compared to its competitors?
For the moment, Luna has nothing to do with what Microsoft offers with its Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, which integrates games from its “day one” studios and offers additional advantages, such as downloading titles on PC and consoles Xbox. So, of course, it seems more expensive since it costs €14.99 per month, but, taken together, the Luna subscriptions cost more. Remember that only seven games are provided with Prime, you have to go through Luna+ or Ubisoft+ to access a real catalog, which costs €16.98 and €24.98 respectively!
Afterwards, the Amazon Prime subscription offers many services that have no link with video games: free and priority deliveries, access to two million music titles to listen to offline (Prime Music), a selection of digital books (Prime Reading), a streaming service (Prime Video), not to mention the games offered by Prime Gaming! So it’s a more than nice addition. Especially since this is only the beginning and the catalogs will certainly expand! Amazon has big ambitions in the video game field, with major license games to come, such as The Lord of the Rings And tomb Raider. This should be a strong argument!
There is no doubt that Amazon will subsequently have to face its major competitor Netflix to find its place in the cloud gaming sector, and even video games in general. Indeed, since November 2021, the Red N has been offering mobile games – on Android and iOS – without additional cost or advertising to its subscribers. He bought several studios in order to offer exclusive titles – including one Assassin’s Creed – and is currently working on the possibility of playing video games on television using a smartphone as a controller (see our article).