Amazon Luna’s overall catalog of games has been dropping consistently over the past few months. The service was forced to shut down two of its channels, and what will remain in the Luna+ channel at the end of March is a little lackluster.
The service has also never offered any of its own platform features – even basic things like friends lists, chat, party support, game leaderboards and achievements have remained missing since the service launched 2.5 years ago in Beta.
Instead of working on its own channels and service features, Luna has been recently working to become more of a simplified streaming layer between existing PC stores and end users on different devices. This is similar to NVIDIA GeForce NOW and Boosteroid (and a handful of other “stream your existing PC games” type services). As an example move in this direction, earlier this year, Amazon Luna enabled a feature allowing Amazon Prime members to stream Ubisoft Connect titles they own in the official Ubisoft PC store via it’s cloud service for free.
Fortnite Appears to be Coming to Luna
We previously reported on a solid rumor that Fortnite could be coming to Luna. Now, it looks like Luna is indeed poised to allow Amazon Prime members to connect their Epic Store account to the service and stream Fortnite to various devices for free! This was tipped off by a user (sophisticated_pie) on reddit who reports having had Fortnite enabled on their account before it was quickly removed less than a day later.
While Luna is about 2.5 years old at this point. It left “Beta” (where users did still have to pay for the service) just shy of 1 year ago. That one year anniversary could potentially be a good time to roll out a big new title and change to the service like this.
The Reddit user reports:
Just fired up Luna to play STEEP and noticed Fortnite was in my library.
EDIT: After signing into my Epic account the play button on Luna now reads: Not available. So I’m unable to play it right now. I guess theyll fully unlock it after an official announcement.
…
Edit 3: As of this morning Fortnite has been removed from my library and playlist. It showed up last night in my library randomly. After linking my Epic account to Luna the ‘Play’ button read: Not available so I was unable to play it. Safe to say an official launch will happen in March.
And, here is a screenshot the user shared:
As is the case with the recent ability to play owned Ubisoft Connect titles, paying Luna+ subscribers do appear to get access to this feature as well. However we suspect that the number of people who are Luna+ subscribers but not Amazon Prime subscribers is likely near zero. The number of Amazon prime members is at least hugely higher.
Big Picture
Here is a summary of Luna’s recent moves:
- Shutdown of the Luna Retro and Luna Family channels
- Consistent removal of games from the remaining Luna+ channel (with few new replacements)
- The addition of Ubisoft Connect PC support and now (seemingly) Epic Store support + Fortnite
This gives a good idea of where Amazon Luna is headed. It looks like they are likely de-emphasizing their own subscription channels (which never had even basic platform features anyway) in favor of offering more of a BYOG (bring your own PC games) offering for Prime members. Allowing all Prime members (in the US at least) to stream Fortnite for free is likely to peak quite a bit of interest – probably much more so than the games they have lost recently from paid Luna channels had.
Finally, we should point out that if this is of interest to you, you can also already play Fortnite for free via the cloud with Xbox Cloud Gaming (no Game Pass subscription required!) and GeForce NOW (though you’ll typically wait in a queue if you are using the GFN free tier).
What do you think? Would this be a positive change for Luna?
this could be a big win for Luna…but if Fortnite can’t bring users to the service, then I don’t see Amazon keeping it around for much longer….fingers crossed. I would love for there to be a big player as a dedicated cloud platform.