Amazon Luna Game Streaming Service Impressions
Streaming games might be the future. It’s too early to say right now. But the promise is enticing. Why spend money every few years on new gaming hardware for your house when it can live in a server rack somewhere else instead and receive constant upgrades? All you need is a high-bandwidth internet connection and the data freedom to pull down 10–20 gigabytes every hour, and you can play PC-quality games on your TV or old laptop.
Unfortunately, for a lot of folks (particularly in the US), internet streaming latency and aggressive bandwidth caps are a big roadblock to this utopian gaming future. That hasn’t stopped numerous major game companies from throwing their hat into the streaming ring. Sony has PlayStation Now (which also has many locally downloadable games), built on the backbone of the early Gaikai service. Microsoft has XCloud, which is again backed up by the robust downloadable library of Game Pass. Google has Stadia, which uses an a la carte/membership combo business model, and was looking pretty good until the other day when Google fired 150 game developers. And then there’s GeForce Now, which has a constantly growing and shrinking library and relies entirely on third party stores and tenuous agreements with publishers.
