Can Amazon’s Luna eclipse its rivals? Amazon has thrown its hat in the ring to be among the first to make cloud gaming a mainstream concern, but how well placed is Luna to navigate these uncertain waters? Chris Wallace finds out
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loud gaming might still be in its infancy, but huge companies are already battling it out to find their footing in this unexplored space. Google may have had something of a head start with Stadia, but they were quickly followed by Microsoft with xCloud, and most recently by Amazon’s Luna. Luna is just the latest gaming offering to come out of Amazon recently, joining the ill-fated Crucible and MMO title New World, but this is arguably its most ambitious to date. Cloud gaming is still unexplored territory, and not one that will be mainstream for years to come just yet. Amazon clearly hopes to leverage Luna alongside its existing services to help it outlast this Hunger
Games-era of early cloud gaming. And from what we know so far, it seems that Amazon may have learned from their rivals’ mistakes – both launching Luna under an all-inclusive subscription model, and as a PWA (Progressive Web App running in a browser) to bypass Apple’s strict App Store rules. It’s all very encouraging, but given the mainstream reception Stadia has received, any cloud gaming offering without an existing customer base will attract cynics. Like VR before it, cloud gaming looks to have a pretty rocky road ahead of it before, hopefully, finding its own audience. We reached out to industry experts to see how Amazon’s cloud ambitions might pan out.
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