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Amazon’s new MMO could come to its Luna cloud gaming service

Amazon’s new MMO could come to its Luna cloud gaming service

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‘I’m fairly confident that at some point you’ll also be seeing New World on Luna’

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A screenshot from Amazon Games’ New World.
A screenshot from Amazon Games’ New World.
Image: Amazon Games

New World, Amazon Games’ upcoming MMO, is just a few weeks away from its September 28th PC launch. But at some point in the future, it could be offered on Amazon’s Luna cloud gaming service, Richard Lawrence, studio director at Amazon Games, said in an interview with The Verge.

“I’m fairly confident that at some point you’ll also see New World on Luna,” Lawrence says. That could expand the number of potential players by a significant amount since Luna is available on lot of different devices, including, as of Thursday, Chromebooks and Amazon Fire tablets.

It’s not clear when the game might come to Luna, though

However, the holdup on bringing the game to Luna is “more on the New World side than anything else,” Lawrence says. He didn’t commit to a timeline for a potential Luna launch, as it sounds like there would be some hurdles to overcome before that would happen.

“Luna specializes in this almost impossible idea of, ‘Oh, I can sling your complex PC experience down to many different devices,’” Lawrence explains. “And [New World] is a very input-driven environment.” That means that if you don’t have a keyboard, mouse, and a dedicated screen or monitor for the game, it may not be as good of an experience, he says. In other words, playing an MMO designed for PC on a controller or on the iPhone 12 Mini’s small screen perhaps wouldn’t be the most optimal way to play.

Still, having New World on Luna could be the kind of tentpole game that brings in new subscribers. Right now, Luna lets you play many games that are also available on other platforms and consoles, but New World could be a standout title that likely wouldn’t be available on any other cloud gaming service.

Streaming New World on Luna would also be an impressive showcase of Amazon’s AWS cloud infrastructure, which is the backbone of both the MMO and the cloud gaming service. It seems likely that Amazon would want to find a way to use its own game to promote its own cloud gaming service all running on its own infrastructure.

That all being said, we don’t know for certain if or when New World will ever be playable on Luna — though based on Lawrence’s comments, it seems like you might be able to some day. In the near term, if you’re interested in New World, you might want to check it out on PC during the open beta, which begins Thursday, or following the official launch on September 28th.