#16 Changing the channel
Amazon’s hardware events aren’t normally a cause to get excited. There’s always some interesting products, but it always feels like more of the same. Yesterday’s event was different - it gave me a reason to get excited.
That reason was the launch Luna - their very own cloud gaming service. At first glance, it looks like every other attempt to take gaming away from dedicated consoles and PCs and into a world where you can use whichever device you have to hand.
What makes it interesting to me is the business model - rather than attempting to sell games individually or provide you with the ‘Netflix of gaming’, they’ve instead gone for something very different and much more traditional - they’re creating the ‘Cable of gaming’.
Rather than ask you to pay out 60 bucks for a new title, Amazon are asking you to pick channels which interest you and subscribe to those. In return you get access to all their games. Right now, we only know about two channels - Luna’s core offering which will give you access to AAA games from a range of publishers and a Ubisoft channel, which will offer day 1 access to their biggest titles - from Assassin’s Creed to Far Cry, if you’re paying their channel subscription, you can play it.
It’s a fascinating move, and one which gives a clear indication of Amazon’s target audience. While Stadia is all about attracting hardcore gamers to give Google a go, Amazon want to use channels to simplify the experience and make it easier for more casual gamers to get their feet wet. And at just 6 bucks a month for the core Luna channel, it’s easy to see this working.
It’s not even the biggest gaming news this week - that honour goes to Microsoft’s remarkable 7.5 billion dollar acquisition of Bethesda - one of gaming’s biggest giants and the publishers of everything from Doom and Fallout through to the beloved Elder Scrolls series. To put that in context, that’s more than Disney paid to buy either Lucas Films or Marvel - who were each valued at 4 billion dollars.
What makes both these moves fascinating is how willing the tech giants are to admit that they can’t crack gaming alone. While Microsoft is an old hand at this, they’ve been busily acquiring studios left right and centre to make games for them, because well, making games is incredibly hard.
And Google aren’t even bothering to push first party games to begin with - focusing on third party games to make Stadia even vaguely worth considering. It’s a remarkable contrast with other areas of hardware and software where they seek to do everything internally and dominate the space through their sheer size.
It also leaves in a position where every major ‘tech’ company is making a play for the gaming space. From Facebook and Apple’s focus on casual/mobile gaming to fill a spare five minutes through to Google, Amazon and Microsoft all attempting to own and define the cloud gaming space, gaming is getting crowded. And because they’re only one amongst a number of features these giants offer, the experience on offer is getting increasingly cluttered.
Google want you to buy a Chromecast and a Stadia controller to use Stadia, except for the times you don’t need to use one. Microsoft’s Games Pass and xCloud is an amazingly broad service, but that breadth makes it hard to know what to play and when. And as for Apple and Facebook, they offer so many ways for you to entertain yourself, you might get distracted before even opening their gaming app.
And that puts the current debate about buying a PS5 or an Xbox into even starker relief.
Because for all the complexity about their feature list, they have a beautiful simplicity to them, that all of these new options can’t match. Once you’ve decided you want to play a game, you just boot them up and choose what you want to play. It’s that simple - and provided it’s an offline game, you don’t have to worry about anything else.
It’s a benefit Nintendo have shamelessly focused on for decades and taken to its ultimate level with the Switch - your Switch plays games wherever you are, and you don’t have to worry about navigating a messy UI to do that or risk getting distracted by the Netflix or Amazon Prime Video icons. It’s gaming time.
To loop back to where we began, you can see why Amazon is so keen on the idea of gaming channels. It’s an attempt to bring simplicity and clarity to their offering - while for now the channels may be focused on individual publishers, you can easily imagine that in 18 months popular games and genres will have their own channel, so you don’t even need to know what exact title you want to play - you can just dip into a genre you’re fond of and go from there.
And because we’re all so familiar with how channels work, you can bring a degree of linearity to the recommendation experience and hero key titles - if you log onto the RPG channel at 8pm on a Thursday, you’ll see the latest Assassin’s Creed as the recommended game to play, just like everyone else logging on. Meanwhile someone who visits the Battle Royale channel early on a Saturday morning might see Fall Guys as the recommendation - the perfect kid-friendly battle royale experience to make that early start a little more bearable.
The potential to use channels to make gaming more accessible to a less dedicated experience is incredible - but it relies on Amazon continuing to show a level of humility and let partners and third parties take the spotlight, rather than attempting to do everything themselves. If they do that - they’re in an incredibly strong position to help define the future of cloud gaming.
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