You Wait Years For A Cloud Gaming Platform And Then Three Come Along At Once

I was just thinking about posting an update about how my GeForce Now experience had been going, when this popped up in my rss feed. To save you clicking through, it's a news article at Games Industry.biz about Amazon Luna, which is now included with a Prime Gaming subscription.

Wait? Wasn't it already? Didn't they switch "Prime Gaming" over to Luna months ago, when they stopped handing out free games? I thought I wrote something about that at the time? 

Let me check a mo... Yes, I did. Kinda... I mentioned it in a Grab Bag, which is about all it deserved.

The whole thing seemed pretty chaotic back then. I have another post where I talk about being able to access my Good Old Games catalog through Luna, which meant I was able to play games I'd claimed through Prime, but which I redeemed on GOG, on Amazon's cloud gaming service. It was about as convoluted as that sounds. I did it a few times and then completely forgot about it until now, which is about par for the course for these things with me. Make logging in more than a single step and I'll probably bounce, after the novelty wears off.

So, what have they done this time? And is it an improvement?

Ehhh... kind of? I gave it a quick test this afternoon so I have a basic grasp of how it works and I have to say it's not exactly intuitive. Or user-friendly. Or anything like as easy as they seem to think it is. Not for me, anyway. 

Amazon believes Luna offers a low-effort, non-technical, crowd-pleasing way to play games. They see a huge number of people playing on mobile devices, people who own neither PCs nor consoles, and they'd like some of that business, thank you very much. 

Amazon has noticed Netflix getting plenty of traction with their gaming offer, now they've integrated it into their basic service. Take-up there has increased massively and as we all know, no-one gave a toss about Netflix games until recently. (Pretty sure no-one reading this gives a toss about them now, either, but people who read whacking great walls of text on gaming blogs are hardly their target audience.)

I know this because at the same time that news article appeared on GI.biz, so did this. It's an interview with Jeff Gattis, general manager for Amazon Luna and Amazon Game Studios, and he's keen to explain the rationale behind giving away the farm.

That is what they're doing, isn't it? Although Prime subscribers have had some limited free access to the platform for a while, the full Luna service used to require a subscription. Now it doesn't. Is that right?

Who knows how it used to work? Or cares, frankly. I'm not going to waste my time researching it because whatever it was, it's changed now. All these cloud gaming platforms have a free version of sorts, then one or more levels of paid subscription. I don't imagine Luna was much different.

As it stands today (And don't quote me on this because I'm guessing making it up quoting Gemini here.)  there are two levels: you can either get Luna free as part of your Prime subscription or you can pay $9.99 a month just for Luna. Which would seem like an exceptionally bad deal, considering all the other stuff Prime gets you...

Or it would if Prime got you the whole package but of course it doesn't. It gets you what they call the "Standard" package. Or it does if you live in the USA or the UK, which are the only two regions where it's being bundled in with Prime so far . It doesn't look as though Standard is available separately outside of Prime, either. A lot of caveats and conditions creeping in, aren't there?

If you want the Premium package, that definitely costs extra, even if you are a Prime subber. Why you'd want it, if you're in the UK or the US, beats me. The only difference I can see is that you get more games and I'm not even sure of that, as you'll see further in.

That's all already more confusing than Amazon would like to believe, something that I'm sure will surprise no-one reading this. Amazon does not have a reputation for clarity where gaming is concerned.

The whole interview with Gattis is very interesting, not to say revealing, as he talks about the various games divisions within Amazon historically not having known what each other was doing, some of the decisions they made being "weird" and how Amazon were after a big share of the PC/Console/AAA market until they realized Steam, Playstation, XBox and Epic were fighting over the same gamers like a bunch of dogs in a sack and decided not to bother with that nonsense any more. Casts some light on New World's demise, that perspective, doesn't it?

What they want to do now, apparently, is get their claws into the 2.5 Billion active gamers, who don't use any of those upscale platforms. And they think they can do it by making it easy to get in on a device you already have, through a subscription you're already paying. There are 200 million Prime subscribers already so that'd be a good start.

Except my experience suggests getting to the games on Luna isn't quite as smooth an experience as all that. As soon as I read the news, I logged straight into my Amazon account and looked for the games. There weren't any. 

There are thirteen tabs along the top of the page and none of them says "Games". Neither does any of them say "Luna". None of them even says "Prime" for that matter. The nearest I could get was "Prime Video", which goes exactly where you'd think it would. No games there.

Right up in the top, left corner there's the Amazon smiley logo and underneath it, in small, blue letters, it says "Prime". I clicked on that. No dice. Just a bunch of cut-price offers. So where are the damn games?

Finally, in the absence of anything better to try, I clicked on the three horizontal lines with "All" next to them. That gets you a drop-down menu and halfway down it you'll find "Amazon Luna - Cloud Gaming." Click on that and you get a sub-menu with four choices - All Games, Play With Prime, GameNight With Prime and Learn More. 

I went for All Games because why wouldn't I? That got me a page featuring a game I actually want to play, right at the top, as the splash image. Wow! Wasn't expecting that. That's it, up there in the header.

Scrolling down, there's a layout very similar to what you see on Prime Video or indeed Netflix. There's a top ten, the latest additions to the platform and some "Editor's Picks". And as I found out eventually, once you've played a game, you get a "Continue Playing" shelf, just like "Continue Watching" on regular Prime. 

If you scroll right to the very bottom you will finally see an "All Games" button. You can then filter that by Standard or Premium although honestly I could hardly tell the difference. The list of Premium titles also includes all the Standard ones so good luck figuring out what's been added. It certainly wasn't obvious where the extra $9.99 a month value was.

But the good news! There are games in the Standard offer I might at least want to take a look at. Dispatch, for a start. That's on my Steam wishlist. I've been waiting for a decent sale. Looks like I can save my money now.  There's also Death Stranding and both Alan Wake games and Hogwarts Legacy and Hollow Knight...

I might play any of those but I will play Dispatch so I started there. Things didn't go too well, at first. 

The first problem was my browser. There's an approved list and Firefox isn't on it. I can't really rag on Amazon for that. Firefox is increasingly not on anyone's list of approved browsers. I keep Chrome always ready in the background for all the services that won't have dealings with Mozilla any more. 

I swapped to Chrome and that worked. Kinda. Luna opens a full-screen window and my mouse pointer would only display in the top couple of inches. It worked on the whole screen - I just couldn't see it. I had to move the mouse about and wait 'til I saw a button light up. A mini-game all of its own!

After a little of that, I got the game started. Inside I found the same issue with the mouse but you don't really need the mouse in the introduction. It's all watching cut scenes and making choices with the keyboard. 

I gave it a few minutes just to check it worked, which it did, then the traffic noise through my open window drowned out the dialog so I opened the settings and switched the subtitles back on (I'd turned them off at the start.) and guess what? The mouse pointer magically appeared. Must be some glitch with the full window.

I tried to take a few screenshots for this post but the old reliable, Win+PrtScr didn't exactly work. It looked like it might have but there was nothing there when I checked the folder later. That'll have to be sorted or I won't be playing. Can't play a game and not be able to take screenshots. It's inhuman!

At that point I decided to stop and have a look at Netflix to see what games they had to offer. I've looked before and it's been a whole load of mobile games of little interest to me but that was a while ago. 

It still is, mostly. There are a lot of them, though. Can't argue with the amount of choice. And there are a handful of semi-interesting titles scattered here and there.

More importantly, the games are right there on the first page. No digging through drop-downs to find them. Much easier. If Amazon are hoping for the same kind of take-up Netflix is getting, they'd better get their UI guys on the job. But then, Prime Video is a chaotic shambles compared to Netflix, so I'm not convinced they have any UI guys, or not any that know what they're doing...

I did find one game on Netflix I'd be interested to try: Oxenfree. I remember reading about that one a long time ago on someone's blog, or at least I think I do, if I'm not mixing it up with something else. I thought I'd try it just to test the ease of access and Netflix faltered at the first fence.

Obviously it wouldn't work with Firefox but that wasn't the problem. The problem was that Netflix games only work on a mobile device. You can't play them on a PC. 

Officially, that is. By which I don't mean there's some back-door access you can hack your way into via some shady third party app. There's a beta for playing Netflix games on TVs and PCs running right now, albeit only in certain, selected territories, the UK being one of them. I tried it and it worked fine. 

I played Oxenfree for just long enough to make sure it was playable and then I logged out. It looks like an interesting game. I imagine I'll be back.

So now I have three options for playing games I don't own, on other peoples' computers. By far my preferred option is GeForce Now, for which I'm paying, and which I'm finding to be very much worth the money. I can play a huge range of games there that I actually want to play already, many of which my current hardware won't run, or not reliably. Since I subscribed, I've used it pretty much every day.

Amazon Luna places a fairly distant second. It is free, since I won't be bothering with the dubious benefits of the Premium version and it does have a few genuinely appealing titles. Given a choice between even this iteration of Luna and the "weird" Prime Gaming of a couple of years ago, though, I'd revert in a heartbeat. I liked collecting those games, even if I never played most of them. I guess that was too good to last. 

I'm also very skeptical that this latest attempt by Amazon to forge a presence in the gaming sector is likely to achieve much more than the last several ruses they tried. If they think what they've got here is going to feel natural and accessible to the huge, casual gamer market I suspect they're going to be disappointed. Again.

Last comes Netflix. Not because of any shortcomings in the platform itself but because it's clearly not designed for me. I don't have a great deal of interest in mobile games and if I did I'm not sure I'd need Netflix to curate them for me. Most of them are free anyway and I already have several options installed to play mobile games on my computers. And even if I didn't, I imagine that even when the Play On TV and Computer option comes out of beta, there still won't be many Netflix games I'll want to try.

Still, I'm not complaining about being given more options, even if I'm not likely to use them. Nor am I going to whinge about extra value being added to subscriptions I'm already paying, even if the value to me is limited.

And, what with the continuing issues with availability and pricing for computer components and the concomitant price rises, we might all be glad of some options in the years to come. Of course, it is herding us all into the walled gardens of various multinationals, where no doubt we'll be swiftly fleeced like the sheep we've become but as Mrs. Bhagpuss and I often comment, as we stroll the English countryside with Beryl, of all the farmyard animals, the sheep seem to have by far the best deal.

There are worse things you can be than a sheep.