Any gaming enthusiast knows that owning an advanced PC that contains all the latest graphic(s) cards, CPU chips, and RAM sticks will give the necessary edge over your opponents. Thanks to Moore’s Law, this can become quite an expensive venture as these parts need to be updated at least every year and a half in order to keep up with the pace of advancements in hardware and in video game features, i.e. 8K, VR, or any other features that make the game look more realistic. Personally speaking, I am not able to afford the luxury of shilling out a nice 1,549 Euros on the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 or similar PC part almost every year to have the best performance on my PC. Therefore, a games-streaming service that would be significantly cheaper than any new parts above, but still have provide the performance of the high-end parts required to build a PC would seem attractive to me.
In come Google Stadia – and now Amazon Luna – with games-streaming services that, according to the reviews, appear to deliver good performance that they promised on when they first released. A games-streaming service can be described as something like Netflix for movies, but for video games. You do not need to own the physical (or digital) copy of the game installed on your hard drive. Instead, you connect your controller to the device of your choosing (TV, PC, or even your phone) and you play the game directly from Google or Amazon servers, without needing an expensive gaming PC rig. With a service like that, a good internet connection (50 Mbps+) and close proximity to the games-streaming servers is required to get the smoothest performance.
Now that Amazon has announced their cloud gaming platform, it enters the market already filled by Google, Nvidia’s GeForce Now, Microsoft’s xCloud, and Sony’s PlayStation Now. Amazon will provide a different value to its competitors because Amazon will have a dedicated channel for Ubisoft games, a major video games publisher. Furthermore, Luna offers a different way to play games compared to Stadia. Luna allows you to select a channel (Ubisoft or Luna Plus) and play any game within that channel in a way you would select movies on Netflix. Whereas Google has games in store that you can buy to play them. Another competitive advantage that Luna will have over other games-streaming devices is the integration with Twitch. Twitch is a video live streaming service owned by Amazon; a popular streaming platform with Google’s YouTube being its direct competitor. Promoting streamers to play on Luna would spread awareness of the service, thus entice more customers to move onto the platform. As a result of this, Amazon’s ecosystem increases in capacity offering a wide range of services attractive to the customers.
What do you guys think? Do you think that cloud-gaming has a future? Let me know in the comments below, and don’t forget to rate this post! 🙂
Links:
https://www.nvidia.com/nl-nl/geforce/graphics-cards/30-series/rtx-3090/
https://www.techradar.com/reviews/google-stadia
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/amazon-luna-cloud-gaming
https://www.techradar.com/news/amazon-luna
