Amazon has announced some changes coming to Luna, its cloud gaming service. I’ll save you reading through the five paragraphs of the announcement’s preamble about rethinking gaming using the power of AI (whatever that means): the big new thing is the debut of a collection of social party games under the moniker of “GameNight.” And it involves Snoop Dogg?
The gist is this: GameNight, being part of Luna, doesn’t require a game console or a PC, but with the new party games, you also don’t need controllers – based on the company’s press release and associated video, Amazon imagines you and your friends sitting in the same room, each armed with a smartphone in lieu of a gamepad.
The service will have a few “GameNight-optimized” versions of existing games like Angry Birds, Exploding Kittens, Ticket to Ride, and Clue. And it’ll launch with Courtroom Chaos: Starring Snoop Dogg, “a human-built, AI-powered improv courtroom game where players invent outrageous characters, spin wild stories, and do whatever it takes to defend their testimonies before Judge Snoop Dogg.” It’s not clear what the AI part of this is, but I’m not optimistic.
Beyond this new collection, Amazon also listed some new AAA titles coming to the service, including Hogwarts Legacy and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. (Lest we forget, “Everything is an Xbox” now.) Those are part of “more than 50 popular, classic, indie, and blockbuster games” coming to the service as part of a rotating library that’s free if you pay for Amazon Prime. You’ll need a good Bluetooth controller for them, of course; if you don’t have one, IGN has a list of favorites, and Amazon is happy to sell you a Luna-official one.
Amazon’s announcement points to a shift in strategy for its cloud gaming platform. Streaming has never really felt like a good fit for traditional video games, thanks to connection issues, wait times, service outages, and often muddy, pixelated gameplay. Casual, mobile-style gaming seems like a better fit for this sort of thing, although it’s hard to see the appeal, considering that people in Amazon’s promotional video are already holding smartphones, the very devices that created the casual gaming juggernaut we know today.
Wes is a freelance writer (Freelance Wes, they call him) who has covered technology, gaming, and entertainment steadily since 2020 at Gizmodo, Tom’s Hardware, Hardcore Gamer, and most recently, The Verge. Inside of him there are two wolves: one that thinks it wouldn’t be so bad to start collecting game consoles again, and the other who also thinks this, but more strongly.
