Amazon’s ‘Play on Luna’ button on Twitch is more potential than practical

Amazon is tying its two big gaming efforts together, the Luna cloud gaming service and the streaming platform called the twitch. If you look at a game page on twitch and it is available on Luna, you will see a button that will take you to the game on the cloud gaming service.

There are still a lot of limitations to Luna that make jumping in and playing a game harder than it should be, even though the button could be a handy way to hop into an interesting game.

Screenshot by Jay Peters / The Verge

To see the button at all, you need to be a member of the early access program for Luna, have linked your Amazon account, and have been accepted into the program. It didn't show up for me when I looked at the Sonic Mania or Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Extraction pages.

The button is buried on a game's overarching Twitch page. I think the button would be more useful on an individual stream of a game, where I could click it while watching something to try the game.

If you have connected your account to Amazon and been accepted to the Luna early access program, you can play on Luna.

Luna has different sets of games that are grouped by channel, and each channel has a separate subscription. You won't know if you subscribe to the correct channel on Luna until you click the button. Since I don't subscribe to any Luna channels, I haven't been able to click the button to start playing a game.

The integration was promised as part of the service's debut in September 2020, so it has been in the works for a long time. The button to play on Luna could be a sign that Amazon is taking Luna more seriously. The button is hard to find and make it work is more complex than it needs to be. Sean Hollister believes that cloud gaming needs to disappear in order to provide a seamless experience.

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