Amazon Prime adds free streaming video games for no extra charge

TV screen displaying a selection of video games under a tab for Amazon Luna — If you already have an Amazon Prime Video subscription, you don’t need to pay for Luna to play its games (Amazon)

As a bid to get more people using the Luna service, Amazon has incorporated it into Prime Video, making it and its games a free extra.

It’s no secret that Amazon has been trying to break into the games industry for years, but so far with little success. Not that that’s stopping it from continuing to try, through co-productions like the new Tomb Raider games and repeated attempts at an internally made Lord Of The Rings project.

Its Luna cloud streaming service has continued to chug along, but while it’s easily outlasted Google Stadia, it’s hardly become a real competitor to traditional consoles and most people have never heard of it.

Rather than pull a Google and give up, Amazon has opted to make Luna more widely available, incorporating it into its Amazon Prime Video service, so that you can access Luna and its games at no extra cost.

Previously, you needed to pay a separate monthly subscription to access Luna, but now Amazon is hoping it can improve engagement by packing it as a free bonus with Prime Video subscriptions.

‘For a lot of people, games have been harder to find than they should be,’ says Jeff Gattis, Amazon’s general manager of gaming, in a recent blog post.

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‘Bringing Luna inside Prime Video allows Prime members to discover games more naturally, and if they see one they like, they click it and they’re in. That’s less time searching and more time playing great games included with their Prime membership.’

Luna is now available as part of Prime Video in the UK and US but only through Fire TVs, since Amazon is prioritising more casual audiences who don’t play enough to warrant investing in a PC.

This is different to the monthly free games it offers as part of Amazon Prime Gaming, where you can redeem PC games from digital storefronts and keep them even if you cancel your subscription.

Amazon is keen to stress that Luna can be easily accessed through its app and that the games are played via streaming and are not a download (so you better have a fast and reliable internet connection).

Presumably, the entire Luna library is included in the deal, which consists of well over 100 games, both from Amazon itself and other publishers, with regular monthly updates.

The blog post highlights Indiana Jones And The Great Circle and EA Sports FC 26, but you can take a quick scout through the Luna library on Amazon’s website if you want a better idea of what’s available.

In an interview with IGN, Gatiss candidly admits that cloud gaming has struggled to be a breakout success, blaming it on how it’s been marketed towards the wrong people.

‘I think that the core gamer who’s invested in a console, who’s invested in a $3,000 graphics card, not only is committed to that hardware, they love that hardware,’ explains Gatiss.

‘We were marketing clouds, and I mean collectively as an industry, at the wrong people, whereas I think there is a much broader audience that will probably never own a console or never own a game PC and never get a chance to play a lot of these games. That’s where I believe in the cloud.’

As such, he acknowledges that there’s little point trying to vie for the PlayStation and Xbox crowds and the focus should be on pushing Luna into untapped audiences.

‘What we saw was a broader opportunity where Amazon, we think, can add real value. Three billion people in the world play games; only about 500 million own consoles and PCs. So we have a lot of people out there that actually like to play video games, but aren’t playing in the highest fidelity setting, aren’t playing in a living room on a big TV or on a PC monitor,’ says Gatiss.

Cloud streaming remains a hard sell, especially when it’s entirely reliant on having a stable internet connection, though Gatiss is confident that the technology has improved over the years and now the goal is to ‘rebuild trust in people who had a bad cloud experience five years ago.’

Unsurprisingly, Gatiss also sees the integration of Luna into Prime Video as the perfect cross-promotion opportunity, since he thinks ‘every TV or movie is going to have a video game story attached to it.’

So, for example, anyone who winds up enjoying the new Tomb Raider TV show Amazon’s producing can be more easily informed about the associated games and quickly access them through Prime Video.

The obvious question about all this is how Amazon expects to make any money from it, considering there’s no additional charge and licensing third big name third party games must be extremely expensive.

It also seems likely to fall victim to the same problems as Games Pass, where many casual players end up being paralysed by the choice and the service devalues their impression of how much a game is worth – to the point where they begin to think they should all be free.