Amazon Luna has had a rough quarter. The service peaked with a library of 300 games in the fall but lost 15 games through November and is set to lose nearly 50 games in December. Unfortunately, two of three Luna+ additions for November are still AWOL and no new games have been announced for December or beyond.
However, today Amazon has announced a couple changes that represent a bit of a shake up for the service.
Play Select Ubisoft Games You Already Own (If You Own Them the Right Way)
Firstly, for paying Amazon Prime subscribers … in the United States … who happen to have purchased one of the 41 Ubisoft titles previously available on Luna on their PC via the Ubisoft Store (not to be confused with purchases via Steam, the Epic store or an Ubisoft+ PC subscription) … you fine folks can now play those games (again) via Luna.
This obviously doesn’t affect a large number of users who are interested in Luna right now. But, it is possible ex-Stadia users may acquire Ubisoft Store copies of games they’ve been refunded for.
It is a little unclear from the blog if there is any kind of automatic progress synchronization between your PC and Luna at this point for most games. Though, a few newer Ubisoft games (e.g. Assassin’s Creed Valhalla) do include the ability to manually back up and restore your progress from the cloud.
Unfortunately, you may also face queue times if you are using this tier of access and the cloud GPUs have other priorities.
If this smells a little like GeForce Now’s model, it’s because it is essentially the same. It’s clunky to purchase games from one vendor storefront to play on a different vendor’s service, but it is workable. However, GFN (and similar services like Boosteroid, Shadow) have a major advantage in that they allow you to play games you already own from the Ubisoft Store as well as many other stores including Steam and the Epic Games store. GeForce Now also offers both free (no amazon prime sub required) and paid tiers – the latter of which have notably better fidelity than what Luna provides.
Luna+ Subscribers Now Get Access to Retro and Family Channel Games
In order to stem the significant loss of value in the Luna+ subscription with the recent and upcoming loss of games, it looks like Amazon is going to be throwing Luna+ subscribers a few bones. They are now bundling all the existing Luna Retro Channel and Luna Family Channel games in with a Luna+ subscription (which costs $9.99 a month). The former channels appear to now be discontinued. While this addition doesn’t exactly make up for the loss of a significant number of AAA games from Luna+, it does provide a fair amount of quantity – over 100 games (depending on how you count the Capcom Arcade Classics).
We do hope this ends the proliferation of small channels on Amazon Luna which can add up in cost (what felt like being nickel-and-dimed).
The Bottom Line
Unfortunately, neither of these changes really affect the bottom line for Luna. Lots of games are leaving the service. No new games have been announced. Two promised games are still missing from November. The service is still missing very basic features like achievements, in game leaderboards, friends/chats/parties, basic-multiplayer and invitations etc. And, the service still has not expanded beyond the United States two years after launch. For more information, check out our full review of the service.
