Luna lander

Amazon's cloud service is relaunching. Is this finally Luna's moment in the sun?

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While it moved into gaming a decade ago, Amazon has yet to have any real impact on videogames. Almost all of its in-house titles have been cancelled before (or, in the case of Crucible, shortly after) release. The curse finally seemed to have been lifted with New World, a WOW-like MMORPG that, while hardly spectacular, managed to retain a playerbase for four years. This October, however, the retail giant announced that development of New World was ending, part of a “difficult decision to halt a significant amount of our firstparty AAA game development”, according to a staff memo from vice president of gaming Steve Boom. As part of this shift in priorities, Amazon announced 14,000 layoffs across its business.

In that light, the relaunch of Amazon Luna at the end of October, barely a week before the cuts were announced, seems indicative of a new direction. While the cloud gaming platform was introduced in 2020, and originally launched in 2022, it has, as former Amazon exec Ethan Evans said earlier this year, failed to “gain significant traction”. But now it’s back.

“We’re really proud of the technology, and we’ve built a nice little business out of it,” Luna GM