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Amazon’s Luna is yet another game subscription service with streaming

With the next generation of consoles bringing a price increase for games along with them, game subscription services are looking mighty attractive.

While there are some good examples of this subscription services – Xbox Game Pass – there are some really bad implementations as well such as Stadia where one needs to purchase games in order to play them.

So, with every developer and their dog creating a subscription service we now have Amazon throwing its hat into the ring with Luna.

Luna will give you access to cloud gaming on your PC, Mac, Fire TV or Apple devices (Android support is coming soon) for $5.99 a month. You will be able to stream games at 1080p 60fps with a promise of 4K streaming “coming soon”.

Amazon has even created its own controller which connects directly to the Luna service for reduced latency.

That sounds really tempting but it’s loaded with a number of caveats so prepare yourself.

That $5.99 price point is early access pricing and early access is only available to users in the US by invitation only.

While that pricing gets you in the door and access to some games, subscribers will have to add subscriptions to channels to access some games.

Luna+ is one of those channels and will get you access to titles like Control, Metro Exodus and more.

According to a report by Protocol, a deal has been struck with Ubisoft to launch its own channel on Luna but subscription fees for that channel are unclear.

To be frank we’re scratching our heads the more we read about Luna.

While Amazon’s solution is better than Stadia where one has to purchase games with no guarantee that they will be around in a few years, Luna pales in comparison to Xbox Game Pass.

Amazon might be able to bring developers and publishers to Luna with the idea of channels but what about users. Frankly, the prospect of having to maintain subscriptions to various channels within the Luna application sounds like a lot of work to us.

To our mind then Amazon is going to have to get the pricing for channels right in order to get users onto the platform.

What we are curious to see is whether Amazon’s local presence will mean Luna becomes available in South Africa. With Amazon stating that Luna is powered by AWS Game Servers though, we’re not getting our hopes up yet.

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