Luna- No, not surprisingly delicious protein bar-Amazon is coming to the world of cloud gaming. Some of us turned our gaze to the announcement and thought, “Hey, why does Amazon need to have its greedy little claws in everything?” When you make an announcement and see what its service will offer at launch time, there is nothing mindful about it. It was also surprisingly low compared to the launch of the Stadia about a year ago, and Luna will be in the same place as the Stadia was and still is. Cloud gaming has big problems and Luna is not equipped yet Solve Any Them.
Exclusive is the most immediate problem that Amazon struggles with. “The real question is whether Amazon can pull this off,” said Just Van Draenen, co-founder and former CEO of Superstata and now a professor at NYU Stern and author of the gaming newsletter. Superjust playlist. That’s because the only thing Luna currently has on Stadia is a partnership with Ubisoft. At the time of the lobby, Ubisoft will have its own sports channel on Luna, where prospective users will meet Sect of Assassins: Valhalla And Far Cry 6 The same day they were released on other platforms. Those games will not exclude Luna, though. So far, Amazon has no major exceptions.
By comparison, Google has excluded time and signed more Exclusive deals Bring their new games to the studio next year with the developers. And while Stadia was still in the testing phase, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey The game was played by beta testers. Sect of Assassins: Valhalla Will also be on the stadia at the time of publication. Sure, Stadia doesn’t have a dedicated Ubisoft channel like Amazon’s Luna, but you can still play Assassin’s Creed And other Ubisoft games, on almost every platform, now also Gef orce. “What we saw [with Stadia] That’s what streaming is all about [be big]. We want games that are easy to access and can be played by everyone, “said Ubisft CEO Yves Gulemot in an interview with June, 2019. Venturebit.
When you consider all of that, Ubisoft was an easy company to contact for Amazon as it is likely to say yes. Ubisoft has its own channel on Luna, but is Game developers raving about the tool Can they be used to make games? Not right now, and who knows when they will.
Amazon has its own lumberyard, a game engine that integrates with Amazon web services, so it’s possible they get a niche or two to start a small game. As Stadia did with the game Gylt. But it doesn’t look like Amazon has spent any of its billions on snagging exclusives. If it had a special, in-house special to launch with Luna, Amazon could make a big splash with its announcement. It may be the original plan, but it’s the first major game launch, Crucible, Went back to closed beta after its release. That’s not a common occurrence in the videogame world, and the developer made the decision after receiving a precedent truck load for negative feedback from the game.
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Games aren’t one of Amazon’s strengths, games are one of St Dia’s Apple’s, Power. What Amazon has done well is to build platforms and devices for content distribution. Amazon has its Kindle. The coolest Mrs. Mesel, An Emmy Award winning show, a Prime Video exclusive. But videogames are different.
And Amazon has tried this before and failed. In 2009, he launched a digital game store that was mostly filled with casual games, but grew to accommodate games from major publishers and developers. However, at the time you could already buy games from PlayStation and Xbox digital stores. Steam too. There was no need to buy games from Amazon unless it was a casual game, and even then there was already Google Play and Apple Paul’s App Store. It was easier for you to input somewhere else than to buy a game from a direct source instead of buying a game code from Amazon. You could buy a physical copy of the game, but the industry was moving away from it. Fast.
Varieties of older stores still remain, where digital copies of games can be purchased from developers and publishers’ storefronts hosted on the Amazon Marketplace. But Amazon’s game market itself is mostly gift cards filled with in-game currency.
Like Amazon’s 2009 gaming storefront, Luna seems to be thinking later. “Gaming in the big, inner Amazon universe is a kind of odd ball ball effort that doesn’t necessarily fit well with whatever it does,” Van Draenen said. One of the big looks seems to be that it could leverage Amazon Web Services (AWG), which also owns a tech giant, to integrate some features with Twitch. But again, it’s not creating original content. It’s just distribution, and it’s more complicated with games than just doing a few deals with Hollywood to put shows on your streaming service. “Creating an ecosystem with third-party content providers, building an audience that prefers your game’s live operations operation, which engages content and is associated with your content, is a very different endeavor,” Van Draen said.
Unless Amazon is willing to spend 5 5 to 10 10 billion over the next two years to acquire exclusive content, it could take several years to capture Luna as a gaming platform, according to Van Drewen. Probably slower than Stadia.
“Whether it’s Apple Paul, Facebook, Google or Amazon, it’s really hard to understand that content is king in big technology. “They’re not talking nonsense about content creators. They’re doing it from their consoles,” said Van Drainen. “So that’s the difference in the ability to value content […] Amazon has gone far beyond itself. It has no content, it has no sense of coming up with content. ”
And that’s true. Luna has nothing special to do fur that is not currently offered by Stadia or other gaming platforms. Does that mean Amazon won’t leave its videogames on the digital storefront? Does that mean Amazon isn’t going to be a big player in the gaming industry? Victor Cao, a partner and senior technical analyst at RSM US LLP, doesn’t think so.
“The scary thing about Amazon? If there is something they are interested in, they will throw money at it. If you look at the grocery and retail sector, they just threw money at it. “
Cloud gaming will not go away. A lot of big companies have invested heavily in it, and it’s really the next step in the evolution of sports. As Cao points out, cartridges have been turned into CDs, CDs have been turned into digital downloads, and we are now in the process of moving from digital downloads to games stored in games and playing entirely on the cloud.
“You have got all the big players who are getting involved in cloud gaming. You got Microsoft. You got Google. You got Amazon. You got Nvidia, ”Cao said. “Amazon is definitely a big threat to the overall gaming environment. It doesn’t usually pull off investments like this. “
But ultimately, Luna’s success will not be determined by how well it works through its controller, how many platforms it supports, or how many games it has. To some extent, the number of games is important only if there are many large and varied titles, but the cloud gaming that is conceived will only emerge when we have the infrastructure for it. And if time is spent fighting Net neutrality And an extension of an affordable, reliable interior Urban and rural places Suffice it to say, it will be a long time before the framework for cloud gaming becomes a major platform.
“It’s baby steps right now, but I think this will get bigger when you think of 5G. When you think of gigabyte fiber connections in everyone’s home. They’re all going to end up there, “Cao said.
And when it gets there, it could be the equivalent of gaming on a local machine or faster. For anyone who doesn’t want to spend hundreds of dollars on a console or even thousands of dollars on a PC, cloud gaming is one way to find homes on this platform, especially more games, like the main and indie. But unless the legislators and the ISP part ways together and provide truly Internet access across the country, cloud gaming will remain out of reach of most people in the country. Micro .ft claims More than 157 million Americans do not use broadband.
So while cloud gaming is out of reach for many, Amazon has to bring something new to the table to make Luna look attractive. Stadia has device tools and exclusives, Micro .ft has its Xbox game pass, Nvidia’s GFs now work on ChromeOS. Luna … Luna is trying so hard to copy everything else.
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