Amazon Luna: We’re not trying to replace consoles (but maybe we could)

What the report says

Listen now on Apple, Spotify or YouTubeIn This Edition,Amazon Luna comes to Prime VideoCan it replace consoles?Amazon talk Unhinged, Bond and Clutch… and reaching ‘tens of millions’ of playersHello there. How is your summer going? Last week we had a lovely chat with Netflix about its new streaming hit Unhinged. The horror game is aimed at an audience that may or may not exist: people that want a narrative video game, but aren’t interested in a console or gaming PC.Netflix is trying to reach these people through the Netflix app. And today, Amazon Luna has announced it’s doing the same thing.

The game streaming platform is now available directly within Prime Video.Luna is a slightly different proposition to Netflix, as it features AAA games such as Indiana Jones, EA Sports FC and Hogwarts Legacy (with Tomb Raider to come). But the goal is similar. And for this week’s edition, I had a chance to find out more from Jeffrey Gattis, who oversees both Luna and Amazon Game Studios.The full conversation is worth watching above. But I’ve also selected some key stories below.Enjoy!Enjoy The Game Business? Why not become a subscriber! It’s free$1,000 game consoles could drive people to Luna, says AmazonAmazon isn’t targeting console players with its Luna streaming platform, the company says.However, with the prospect of $1,000 video game machines, it might prove a viable alternative for gamers who are unwilling, or unable, to afford such devices.“Our business isn’t predicated on replacing consoles,” saidJeffrey Gattis, Amazon’s general manager for games.“Historically, cloud gaming has been a little bit of a solution in search of a problem.

Consoles, for the most part, have been relatively inexpensive until now. So, our business is more about reaching more players and expanding the market, not trying to get people to give up their consoles or gaming PCs.“The world doesn’t need another one of those. They don’t need a fourth entry selling the same games and competing for the same pie of players. It really isn’t growing.“Having said all that, we saw the Steam Machine opening at $1,000. We hear rumors about consoles, because of the RAM crisis, pushing up over $1,000 in Gen 10.

Key details

So, I do think you get to a point at which more people will be in the consideration set for a cloud gaming solution, just because of the sheer cost of buying dedicated hardware.”Gattis was speaking to The Game Business following the news that Luna is being added to the Prime Video app. Now Prime subscribers can access games like EA Sports FC 26, Hogwarts Legacy and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, directly via the app.Amazon hopes this will help it find an audience who might be interested in console-like games, but isn’t interested in buying a console.“This is about reaching players that a lot of those games are never going to be able to reach.

Particularly in a world of $1,000 consoles.”“There’s three billion people in the world who play video games, yet there’s only, depending on how you do the math, 300 million to 500 million dedicated hardware devices out in the wild,” Gattis said. “So, there’s a lot of people who have some sort of affinity for video games. Maybe they’re playing on mobile. Maybe they’re playing through a browser. But they’re not having the highest fidelity experience.“And when you start to unpack a little bit about why they don’t do that. We’ve just talked about hardware getting increasingly expensive, and games can be big investments to go buy a $70 game, to go through the download experience, to pair a controller, and then spend hundreds of hours, in some cases, to complete them.

So, we see an opportunity to serve a group of people who haven’t really been well served because the console and PC companies are mostly focused on those hardcore players.”He continued: “For the first time in a long time, I feel like we have a single gaming strategy. We understand what we’re doing, we understand what we’re not doing, and we’re executing against it.