Amazon Adds ‘Play on Luna’

Amazon has accomplished something that Google either couldn’t or refused to achieve. That is, by making the games on the gaming service immediately accessible from the company’s video platform, it hopes to improve integration between its cloud gaming service and its video platform. Amazon has introduced a new “Play on Luna” option to Twitch, as originally noticed by Vet Cloud Gaming and subsequently reported in a tweet by Bryant Chappel (via 9to5Google).

If you have an active subscription to Amazon’s cloud gaming service, Luna, the “Play on Luna” button on Twitch will show. You can go to Twitch and look for a game if you have a Luna subscription, as demonstrated by Vet Cloud Gaming.

When you view the searched game’s page on Twitch, you’ll see a new “Play on Luna” button next to the Follow button if the game is available on Luna.

When you click the “Play on Luna” button, Twitch will automatically open the Luna app and start the game for you, with no need for you to do anything else. To play the game, simply click the “Play on Luna” button.

Subscribers to Luna may already watch Twitch streams, and with the new “Play on Luna” option, Amazon has fully delivered on a promise it made when it first unveiled its Luna cloud gaming service in 2020. In 2020, Amazon stated, “Inside the Luna experience, players will see Twitch streams for games in the service, and from Twitch, they’ll be able to instantly start playing Luna games.”

Google intended to implement something similar to Amazon’s “Play on Luna” button. Google indicated in its announcement of Stadia, its cloud gaming service, that it planned to create a means to start playing a game on Stadia right from the game’s trailer on YouTube by tapping a button on the video platform.

Google also expected Stadia members to be able to join a multiplayer game via a streamer’s YouTube channel, but none of that happened, and Amazon now appears to be picking up the slack.