Amazon integrated Luna into Prime Video. Microsoft will stream games you already own but with ads inserted. Both companies looked at cloud gaming and decided the problem was insufficient business model fuckery.
Luna failed as a standalone product because people who want to play games own consoles or PCs. Attaching it to Prime Video solves this by exposing it to people scrolling past Jack Ryan reruns at 2am. The target demographic is now "accidentally clicked the wrong menu option."
Microsoft's approach is more elegant. You bought the game. You own the game. Now watch an ad for dish soap before the game you purchased will stream to you over servers you're implicitly paying for through Game Pass or bandwidth or the slow heat death of your goodwill. This is the same company that wanted to charge you to share used Xbox discs in 2013. They learned nothing except how to monetize your existing library.
Cloud gaming has been the future for eight years. Google killed Stadia. Nvidia charges monthly for the privilege of streaming games you bought elsewhere. PlayStation Now rebranded into something equally forgettable. The value proposition remains: pay us to introduce latency and compression artifacts into an experience that works fine locally.
Amazon's play makes sense if you squint. Prime subscribers already tolerate Freevee ads and Thursday Night Football. Adding a gaming service they didn't ask for costs Amazon nearly nothing in goodwill because the goodwill evaporated somewhere between the third price hike and the unskippable Reacher promos.
Microsoft's ad-supported streaming targets people who somehow need to stream games they own while also tolerating ads. This person does not exist. Microsoft will find twelve of them and call it a growth segment.
Both strategies assume the failure of cloud gaming was a marketing problem and not a "this is objectively worse than the thing people already have" problem.
Photo by on Unsplash
Leave a Comment