It’s a rare thing to see cloud gaming get any advertising. Back in the day, Google Stadia ran a short advertising campaign on Google’s own YouTube video platform. That is the only real mainstream advertising we think a cloud service has ever gotten. Until now that is! Amazon Luna has begun actively advertising on Twitter. We’ve seen several ads over the last couple of weeks. They seem to be focused on Fortnite (which was just added to the service) and a couple other big games.
Here is one of the ads that we caught in the wild
And, here is another highlighting Batman: Arkham Knight:
But, Are The Ads Working?
One of the metrics we actively track is cloud gaming service twitter followers over time. Check out the plot below tracking @amazonluna followers over time:
You can see a major uptick in the number followers over the last couple months. Quite a lot of big changes have arrived for Luna over the past couple months, however. So, it is tough from that plot to tell what is driving growht. Is it possible to tell which major event is responsible for the growth of the community on Twitter? If you look at the derivative of that above plot (the growth rate instead of the value itself), it actually becomes pretty clear!
On this plot, you can very clearly see the effects of Country Expansion, Fortnite‘s release and the sustained growth being caused by advertising. So, it looks like their advertising campaign is working! The @amazonluna twitter is account is gaining 100+ new followers a day.
We should put this into perspective, though… @XboxGamePass for example is growing at over 600 followers a day during the same period.
Still, it is great to see a cloud gaming service actually… trying! We’ve long thought one of the headwinds against cloud gaming was lack of marketing compared to traditional gaming options.
