Amazon had a blitz of video game-related press this morning, as it announced that its Luna game streaming service will now show up on Prime, instead of being a standalone thing. From Amazon’s point of view, this will make its games easier for users to find. But in further conversations beyond the press release, the move shows Amazon leaning into a strategy that isn’t working for Netflix, but that Amazon seems to think might work for them.
Speaking to GamesIndustry, general manager of Luna and Amazon Game Studios Jeff Gattis said he wants to unify Amazon’s various games offerings (Luna, Prime Gaming, and the games Amazon makes itself– though not, intriguingly, Twitch) into one place. AGS’ games will be published on Luna, though some Amazon-made titles will still show up on other platforms too. Beyond helping people find and play the games Amazon makes and offers, another focus of this move is to reach more casual players, people who may not own a console, but might play an Amazon game if they see it in the same place they look for The Boys and Fallout.
“The thought was we're going to go get people to turn in their consoles and drop their gaming PCs and come to Luna. We've kind of abandoned that,” Gattis told GIbiz, saying the company instead aims to focus on people who “play games, but they're not able to play on a television screen.”
With the cost of hardware rising, Amazon sees an untapped market here, instead of trying to compete with the Steams, PlayStations, and Xboxes (where Gattis worked before coming to Amazon in March 2025) of the world.
Gattis also highlighted the success of “mass appeal IP” games, like Hogwarts Legacy, and said Amazon intends to continue leaning into that name recognition–“A big part of our content strategy going forward is going to be leveraging Amazon IP”--while making sure these games “aren't incredibly difficult to play, the game mechanics aren't super hard to learn.”
He also highlighted Luna’s GameNight, a collection of party games subscribers can play with their phones. “[T]he idea is that you're not committing 60 hours to a game or watching YouTube videos to figure out how to play,” he said.
Sound familiar? As GIBiz also notes, a lot of this sounds pretty similar to Netflix’s endless “scratching the surface” of games. That company has also tried to leverage name recognition through games like Squid Game: Unleashed and FIFA World Cup–the latter of which, GameFile reported, had 1.5 million players in its first week and embraced a similar casual strategy as Gattis espouses, with FIFA developer Delphi Interactive CEO Casper Daugaard telling GameFile that they wanted to make the game easy. Netflix has also experimented with shoving games into the same places people watch TV, as well as leaning into party games, with co-CEO Gregory Peters saying the company had seen “really strong uptake” in its party games in a Q4 2025 earnings call.
I don’t disagree with both companies’ strategies to stop trying to compete with more robust gaming storefronts and hardware. And it’s an apt, if not depressing, sign of the times to see both companies trying to cash in on how rising hardware costs are affecting players. (Dismally for different reasons, Xbox is getting in on this action too, this morning announcing a test of ad-supported game streaming.)
But Netflix has flailed dramatically in the video game space, as has Amazon, with both companies closing studios or having developer layoffs, embracing AI slop, and generally wreaking havoc with workers’ livelihoods as they try to figure out what the hell they’re doing. As Netflix’s continual sidestepping of the numbers could indicate, it’s following a murky, mid-tier playbook, one that’s proved disastrous for game developers and workers when it inevitably fails to immediately produce the subscriber numbers these companies thirst for. Amazon seems to think things will go differently when it runs the same plays… just because?
While the covid gaming boom might’ve cooled, non-gaming companies are still suddenly realizing games exist, trying to make money from them by throwing everything at the wall except simply paying people to make good games, and then pivoting to some next doomed strategy when things don’t work out fast enough. Amazon has rolled out a press tour to attempt to inspire confidence, with Gattis lightly acknowledging past failures while touting this as the move, like every badly-thought-out games non-strategy before him. It didn’t work for those people, but it might work for us.
