Amazon Luna Review – Can you buy streaming success?

thesixthaxis.com:

Despite the demise of Google’s Stadia, streaming still looks as though it has a place in gaming. Microsoft, Sony and NVIDIA are continuing to plough money into the sector, and Amazon, never a company to miss a business opportunity, have joined them, finally rolling out their Luna streaming platform to locations around the world. Thanks to their Fire TV infrastructure, they’ve already got a foot in the door, but the question is, can they add a hand with a controller in it?

Streaming is seen as the golden goose of the gaming sphere, allowing gamers to play whenever and wherever they like with very little in the way of physical hardware, but perhaps it’s really the Golden Fleece, constantly chased thanks to its perceived benefits, but often resulting in a series of painful, borderline embarrassing, quests. Both Onlive and Stadia have been the sacrificial lambs at the altar of gaming progress, but Microsoft and Sony’s iterations on cloud gaming have sat quietly in the background, gaining in technical prowess while never being the first option. NVIDIA’s tech meanwhile has been giving power-poor PC gamers a wallet-friendly option to keep pace with the increase in processing power that inevitably comes, and successfully too, though with a library that’s been beset by caveats.

Let’s start with Amazon Luna by talking physical hardware, and much like Stadia, Luna firstly utilises the Amazon TV platform as a base. Anyone that owns an Amazon Fire stick or Cube will find Luna nestling amongst its available apps, and it’s easy to hop straight into the Luna UI from here. Luna is also available on PC, Mac, iPhone and iPad, Android, Chromebook, and Amazon Fire tablets, as well as through a native app on the most recent batch of Samsung