Jeffrey Gattis, general manager for games at Amazon, hopes to see more people try its cloud gaming service Luna as consoles and PCs become eye-wateringly expensive.
Speaking with The Game Business, Gattis weighs up the increasing costs of gaming today. Component supply chains decimated by AI data centers forced even Valve's wealthy hand (as it refuses to sell hardware at a loss), leading to a flagrantly overpriced Steam Machine that would've been a proper hit with a sticker in the high three-digit range.
Now even Xbox is preemptively talking about how consoles have to adapt to the memory and storage market, in roughly the same way that a dinosaur must adapt to being on fire.
Gattis inherited the difficult task of getting people to know and care about Luna, which was announced in 2020 and swiftly forgotten. By baking it straight into Amazon Prime Video, Gattis says "we've 5x-ed our player base, albeit on a modest base," which is the kind of corporate speak that reveals a very modest starting audience.
But Gattis is optimistic about Luna and cloud gaming's future, especially in a world where the Steam Machine and rumored new-gen consoles cost "well over $1,000."
Cloud gaming has long been "a little bit of a solution in search of a problem," Gattis reflects, but that was in a world where core gaming was relatively affordable.
"Consoles, for the most part, have been relatively inexpensive until now," he says. "So our business is more about reaching more players and expanding the market, not trying to get people to give up their consoles or their gaming PC.
"Having said all that, we've seen the news. We saw the Steam Machine pricing opening at $1,000 US. We hear rumors about consoles, because of the RAM prices, pushing well over $1,000 in gen 10. So I do think you get to a point at which a lot more people will be in the consideration set for a cloud gaming solution just because of the sheer cost of buying dedicated hardware."
Gattis reckons there are "3 billion people in the world who play video games, yet there's only, depending on how you do the math, 300 million to 500 million dedicated hardware devices out in the wild."
In that difference of roughly 2.5 billion gamers, he sees the potential cloud gaming market of tomorrow – folks who don't have the time or money for the latest consoles or PC games, but do want to play something. And as long as they're comfortable with the limitations of cloud gaming licensing.
"Games can be big investments – to go buy a $70 game, to go through the download experience, to pair a controller, and then make an investment of hundreds of hours of time, in some cases, to complete one of these games," Gattis reasons, perhaps exaggerating the arduous toil of pairing a controller.
"There's people like me who love that. That's how I choose to spend my entertainment time. But I think most people fit into more of a bell curve, a more normal distribution. They spend some time watching television, they spend some time watching movies, and they like to play video games. I think that's where we see an opportunity to serve a group of people who I might argue haven't really been well-served because the console and PC companies are mostly focused on those hardcore players."
The big problem, of course, is that Amazon has struggled to get anything right in games. Its once-roaring MMO New World is dead, its Lord of the Rings MMO is reportedly dead, and Amazon Studios' primary exports so far have been layoffs and cancellations. It turns out all the money in the universe can't just magic games into being, so even if Luna was always meant to be a third-party game merchant, it's in untrustworthy hands in the eyes of many players.
