Former Xbox corporate vice president and chief product officer, Marc Whitten, has left his role as vice president at Amazon Luna, mere months after the new cloud gaming service was announced.
As spotted by strategist Michael Ball on Twitter, Whitten’s departure occurred earlier this month and now sees him heading Unity Create as senior vice president and general manager.
https://twitter.com/ballmatthew/status/1364560226838605828?s=21
As mentioned on Whitten’s LinkedIn profile, he was one of the first employees at Xbox, nurturing the birth of Xbox Live into what it is today. He resided at the company for 17 years, before moving onto other companies such as Amazon.
Luna is another cloud gaming service that was announced back in September last year. It partnered with Ubisoft to deliver access to games such as Assassin’s Creed Valhalla available the day and date they launched.
The news comes shortly after it was announced Google Stadia would no longer be supporting first-party titles. Instead, the focus has shifted to pushing out third-party support for Google's cloud service. It will be interesting to see what happens to Amazon Luna over the next year.
Have you tried Amazon Luna yet? Let us know in the comments below.
[source twitter.com]
Comments 9
Well Luna is still pretty cheap and it's just a service unlike whatever Stadia was but....they do have limited games and you need a good internet connection. I think that the Stadia mess will likely make people weary of the service. They are doing it right by having a low entry point in price and the lack of new hardware from Xbox and Sony could get more people to give it a go as a result.
I'm fine with Xbox and Gamepass so I'm not messing with it at all.
Is Microsoft single-handedly taking down all these new competitors with their power play moves (e.g. acquiring ZeniMax)? I mean sure this doesn't have to mean anything significant but I still feel like Microsoft's actions have been heavily influencing companies like Amazon and Google. There was even a report about how Microsoft had influenced Google: https://www.purexbox.com/news/2021/02/google_stadias_studio_closures_were_influenced_by_xbox_claims_report
It's definitely interesting nonetheless.
This is probably a side effect of Stadia being abandoned. Even though Google are infamous for abandoning products, Amazon probably saw the Stadia abandonment and thought "if Stadia's pretty much dead, Luna stands no chance".
@Grumblevolcano @LtSarge so is it back to Sony and Nitendo being the competition or is Tencent it? Tencent is just getting their hands in every pot and possibly planning on eventually upping their investment until one day they have a controlling interest and technically own the companies? I'm very happy with Microsoft at the moment but they need competition as they wouldn't have made the moves they did if they were on top the whole time. Sony is now reacting to the threat of Xbox as they know they are going to be taking a hit on market share this gen. I want them to be fighting one another for my money as it's the only way I win.
@Krzzystuff I'm with you on this, I do want Amazon and Google to pose a threat to Microsoft in order for Game Pass to keep improving. At the same time though these moves may have been made primarily to make Game Pass more appealing, with the secondary effects being to intimidate the competitors.
But yeah, as things are looking right now, Microsoft has very little competition in the realm of gaming services. The thing is that that's where they will keep on heading with Game Pass, so Sony/Nintendo just aren't relevant for them anymore. Unless Sony decides to charge in with a stronger focus on PS Now, which could happen I'll admit.
@Krzzystuff
Nintendo are off doing their own thing, so I wouldn't class them as competition.
Sony however are competition. They have the larger popularity and install base, but they are sort of playing catch up to the forward thinking at Xbox.
It's all a bit like Netflix early days for me atm.
In the sense that MS are leading the way by a large margin with the Game Pass/cloud model with no serious rival, but like with Disney+ the past year, Sony have a ton of quality content that could shift the tide if they went down that route.
Just days ago there was a report that mentioned that the numbers of Xbox, PlayStation and Steam are relatively similar:
Xbox: 100 million active users (18 million are subscribed to Game Pass in 2021)
PlayStation: 114 million active users (2 million are subscribed to PlayStation Now in 2020)
Steam: 120 million active users (2021)
The numbers for Xbox are good if you consider that Xbox is focused on consoles, PC and services and that we'll soon see the Xbox app on smart TVs. PlayStation is slowly entering the PC market and PS Now is not popular. Steam is the traditional PC market. Nintendo is king of handhelds (Vita while nice hardware was an epic fail). Xbox and Nintendo are all about a different kind of value and Sony is somewhere in between with the most aggressive fan base. It looks like Xbox is consolidating its place as a gaming paradise "everywhere" and Nintendo as a handheld realm while Sony (Jim Ryan) is playing with marketing shadowy to stay on "top" but that "top" just means home consoles sold and it's not the whole picture. That's, precisely, why Sony is entering the PC market. This is the most atypical generation ever but the most promising for Xbox.
Source (for numbers):
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2021-02-17-is-xbox-game-pass-too-good-to-be-true
https://www.deseret.com/entertainment/2020/5/19/21263678/playstation-now-plus-subscribers
As a game casual game controller collector, got to get me one of those Luna controllers before they, too, vanish away... Not sure I want to throw 70 at a controller I don't plan to use, though.
Amazon Luna, yet another example of some big mega-corporation trying to enter gaming and doing it all wrong with streaming.
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