Amid layoffs and lost games, Amazon Luna comes to Canada, Germany, and the UK

Amazon Luna, the cloud gaming service, is expanding to Canada, Germany, and the UK. I certainly didn’t have that on my bingo card.

Remember: Google Stadia is dead as a doornail, and Amazon Luna, the company’s rival cloud gaming service, wasn’t doing much better. It lost a lot of games, and that was after the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority estimated it had less than 5 percent of the cloud gaming market. Oh, also, Amazon’s in the middle of layoffs so brutal that even iconic camera review site DPReview is about to shut its doors.

But this? This feels like a sign that the company’s planning to take advantage of the gap left by Stadia instead of throwing in the towel.

We were very unimpressed by Amazon Luna’s performance at launch, and rival Nvidia GeForce Now has made leaps and bounds since, but it’s been years since we gave Luna a good try. We’re probably overdue.

Know that Luna’s business model is very different from Stadia or GeForce Now; you have to pay for subscriptions to one or more “channels,” almost like cable TV, where each offers its own Netflix-like all-you-can-eat access to a specific catalog of games. You can pay $17.99 USD a month for Ubisoft Plus, which includes most of Ubisoft’s major PC titles, $4.99 USD a month to get the Jackbox Games collection of party games, or $9.99 USD a month for the Luna Plus subscription that offers a variety from other publishers. Luna Plus has a 7-day free trial.

Unfortunately, the overall list of games is still pretty small. So small, in fact, that I can comfortably share screenshots of Luna’s entire UK offering — every game — in the screenshots below.