Amazon announces its new cloud gaming service Amazon Luna

Silent_Gunner · Sep 24, 2020

morvoran said:
It is good that more companies are jumping on this bandwagon as more competition means more competitive pricing and features.
If Amazon adds this service to their Prime membership, I will definitely try it out.
I don't like the copied switch pro controller as the buttons hurt my thumbs after playing for an hour on the pro controller.

While game streaming is a new(ish) technology full of bugs/lags and other disappointments now, it will be the future of gaming. Instead of buying a $3000+ power pc and having to buy a $1200+ gpu every 2 years, you can play games on a potato or a small stick such as the fireTV for around $15-$20 per month. Unfortunately, this may mean no piracy or physical media to own which will also kill any hopes of future emulation prospects unless the games can be fully ripped off of the gaming servers and played offline.

I mean, sure on the economic aspects, I guess, but either way, this is the customer taking it from behind by force and not by choice if they had their way. Personally, I think streaming is best via Steam, where its your games, its free, and if you can get it to work correctly, more power to you...but I have a HTPC setup for gaming, so I don't see much of a reason to go for streaming unless I'm in the bathroom, and even then, I'd rather just take my Switch, 3DS, or PSP Go with me instead.

Pipistrele · Sep 24, 2020

Scott_pilgrim said:
I don’t get the point of having indie titles like sonic mania that could run on a toaster on a service like this

Mobiles and all - many devs are still unwilling to port their indies to Android/iOS due to ruined marketplaces and diminishing returns, so that's one way to play those on the go without cashing out for Switch.

Deleted User · Sep 24, 2020

Scott_pilgrim said:
Well, this one was a switch pro controller copy sooooo

and the switch pro controller clearly takes some inspiration from the one's controller

HideoKojima · Sep 24, 2020

Looks like a switch pro controller

Julie_Pilgrim · Sep 24, 2020

Pipistrele said:
Mobiles and all - many devs are still unwilling to port their indies to Android/iOS due to ruined marketplaces and diminishing returns, so that's one way to play those on the go without cashing out for Switch.

I mean you could stream those to a phone from a pc if you really want portability and for some reason refuse to get a switch

MadMakuFuuma · Sep 24, 2020

Azerus_Kun said:
and the switch pro controller clearly takes some inspiration from the one's controller

shhhhh.... let people blindly think that Nintendo never copied others designs XD.

but seriously, seems like a good controller. I'm more interested in the service. only time knows

Tom Bombadildo · Sep 24, 2020

Won't bother with it myself since I have a capable gaming PC, but more competition for this kind of thing will hopefully help streaming services evolve a bit more so sure why not. Glad it's subscription based and not like the shit show that is Stadia.

mightymuffy · Sep 24, 2020

Well it's a damn sight better than Stadia at least, and could rival xcloud, but I'm not keen on this 'introductory price' of $5.99 per month, ditto the $49.99 for the controller... so it'll go up in price afterwards,THEN you've got this Ubisoft gaming channel where you play their latest games, so that'll cost extra on top, all to play some compressed, black crunched laggy game..... We've been stung too many times already Amazon, you're gonna have to show off something better before I'm remotely interested!

Rail Fighter · Sep 24, 2020

Having the hardware is somewhat part of the fun.

werewolfslayr925 · Sep 24, 2020

I really don't understand this. Other than it being a "subscription" service, what's the difference between this and just downloading whatever games you want from their selection off of Steam? Can someone explain this to me?

Tom Bombadildo · Sep 24, 2020

werewolfslayr925 said:
I really don't understand this. Other than it being a "subscription" service, what's the difference between this and just downloading whatever games you want from their selection off of Steam? Can someone explain this to me?

People who don't own a gaming PC can play the games on whatever device Amazon supports. Not everyone has a gaming pc they can just download whatever games off of Steam.

Deleted User · Sep 24, 2020

Scott_pilgrim said:
I mean you could stream those to a phone from a pc if you really want portability and for some reason refuse to get a switch

streaming is not an option everywhere, one of the places i often been playing games now is on parking lots (due to covid only one person per household can enter supermarkets, however, i help my mother get the bags from the kart to the car) and i dont get a good signal down there. It is highly unlikely to happen, but i wish Valve released their own mobile store with the same level of quality control as Steam, they already have a few games on the android, so it's a good starting point, people often say Steam barely has any quality control, but they clearly never saw the Google Playstore

MadMakuFuuma said:
shhhhh.... let people blindly think that Nintendo never copied others designs XD.

but seriously, seems like a good controller. I'm more interested in the service. only time knows

what's odd is that xbox, being such an fps focused console, didnt try copying the wii u pro controller, having both analogs on top makes so much more sense than offset in this case

the_randomizer · Sep 24, 2020

Digital downloads are better than streaming.

m_babble · Sep 24, 2020

If they make it compatible with the Switch pro controller I'd give it a whirl at least for a month. Not willing to invest in another expensive controller for something that might suck.

Sakitoshi · Sep 24, 2020

>it has the xbox analog layout
dropped

Hambrew · Sep 24, 2020

I mean, with the controller, DS mic emulation is actually feasible.

Naxster · Sep 24, 2020

Eww another cloud gaming service... No thanks

Viri · Sep 24, 2020

It's amusing how some of the games on there could easily run on a Fire stick or a cell phone just fine, and doesn't even need cloud streaming.

Rj.MoG · Sep 24, 2020

If I had a nickel for every game streaming I’ve seen fail I’d have two nickels

which isn’t a lot but it’s weird it happened twice

Kurt91 · Sep 25, 2020

If it ends up being the "Netflix, but with games" that people have been wanting, and it actually works well at a cheap price, then yeah I can see this being a success.

Best case scenario would be if your save files are still kept locally. That way, let's say that I decide that I don't want to continue paying for the service for whatever reason and just buy a copy of my favorite games to run on my own computer. I can use my existing save file and continue where I left off, rather than being stuck on the streaming service because I don't want to lose many hours of progress.

I'm a little curious if something similar to how 3D All-Stars handled Super Mario Galaxy could be done to improve streaming performance on something like this. Galaxy had parts of the game emulated, while other parts of the game were fully ported. Similarly, I wonder if the streaming service could check your hardware and figure out which parts of the game could be processed locally to minimize how much data needed to be streamed live. If you only process part of the game locally, then you wouldn't just be downloading the whole game yourself, but maybe the audio or something, and it would lighten the load for better performance. Seems a lot more viable than trying to develop ways to stream data faster than what's physically possible, by splitting the load as much as possible.

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