Amazon Luna: Hands-on with the new cloud gaming service

Amazon is getting into the cloud gaming business with Luna is better than stadia is worth six bucks a month. Here's what I discovered during my early hands on [MUSIC] So what exactly is Luna? It's a cloud based streaming game service. Google has a version called stadia Nvidia has one called GeForce Now, both Microsoft and Sony had versions of cloud gaming. What happened is your game gets played on a remote server somewhere, and the output of that game basically gets beamed to whatever screen that you're playing on. Now the good part of this is that you don't need a powerful PC or a gaming console or anything else; To play a game, really almost any compatible screen will work. The bad part is it's very dependent on your internet connection. Because all the video output from the game that's being played on this round server farm somewhere is getting beamed to you in real time. So if you have any hiccups in your internet speed or anywhere along the way, that can give you a very choppy experience. In a nutshell, here's how it works. If you're playing a cloud based game, you basically press a button on your controller or on your computer keyboard, that signal gets sent up through the internet to the remote server somewhere where the game is actually being played. The game action happens and then the video output is being backed up over the internet. So that means there's always this. Certain amount of lag built in. Now, people have been trying to crack this code for 10 plus years. No one's really done it yet. But the modern versions, like stadia and like Luna are certainly a lot better than the versions from even a few years ago. So we're getting closer all the time. I played Luna on a couple of different PCs. I played it on a gaming PC. I played it on a Surface tablet. Both cases I just use the browser based version of the Luna service. Which meant I just opened up the lunettes app in my Chrome browser and was able to jump into a game right from there. Amazon has its own custom Luna controller they want you to buy and use. I don't have one of those yet. I was just using a standard Xbox Game Controller connected to my computer via Bluetooth. Now in my early hands on experience with Luna Considering that there's not too many people on the system yet, I thought it was pretty smooth. It actually felt a lot better than a lot of the stadia games that I played. That's at stadia. That's the Google version of this also has some games that play great under almost any circumstance, but they really just have a handful that are really super fully optimized for that stadia platform. So on Luna, I tried a couple of the more alias games, one called control. The other one is the latest Metro game. These are both action shooter game. So you really want as little lag and as little choppiness as possible. And I'll say for the most part, I got that Now here's the catch. Luna is six bucks a month from Amazon. And for that you get a subscription to about 50 games that you can just play without buying anything extra. Later on there'll be More game packages from Luna from different publishers. These are apparently going to be for an additional cost. We don't know exactly what that is yet or what games those will be. But for the basic $6 a month package that Luna offers, I mean, I'll be honest, except for those one or two more popular games, a lot of them are very casual games, older games. If you really want to play rez or luminous. Or steamworld dig? I'm not sure you really need a cloud gaming infrastructure built for basic casual games like that. Right now there are only a handful of what you consider like real PC gaming or console gaming caliber games. On the system. Now a comparison stadia the Google version, they're getting access to newer popular games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldurs Game 3. You do have to buy them separately as if they were full games but they are supported by the system. For now though, Amazon Luna really feels more like a beta than anything And it's one that probably should be free at least until there's something more to it.