I’m still mourning the loss of Google Stadia - not so much what it was, but what itcould have eventually become. I still believe cloud gaming is the future, even if Google isn’t going to be the one that leads us there, and I’ve been spending some time trying out the other game streaming services to see how they stack up. Two of the best options right now are Game Pass and Amazon Luna, but neither of them quite lives up to the cloud gaming future Stadia once promised. Both are missing the exact qualities that the other has, and if they could somehow be combined, they’d make one pretty great streaming service.
Amazon sent me a Luna controller to try out recently, and I was pleased to find that Luna does a lot of the same things that Stadia did well. After setting up the controller through the mobile app, it connects directly to your home network to give you a perfect connection without any latency, no matter what device you’re playing on. Accessing the library on the Luna website is easy, and you can use the controller or mouse and keyboard to navigate the menus, select a game, and start playing right away. Occasionally, I found I had to wait a few minutes for an available server before I could start playing, but it was still way faster than downloading a game. The streaming quality is excellent on my 200mb/s network, and except for a few random lag spikes, it was easy to forget that I was even streaming.
Related:I’ll Always Miss What Stadia Could Have Been
Luna isn’t as accessible as Stadia was. you may access games through a browser on PC, an Amazon Fire Stick or Fire TV, a Fire Tablet, or an iPhone. I invested in Chromecast for Stadia so I don’t have any Amazon streaming devices, Fire Tablets are lousy, and I have an Android phone, so the only way I can play Luna right now is on my PC. Stadia felt like the service I could access anywhere, while Luna is more of a walled garden.
In a perfect world, you’d be able to launch the Game Pass app on any device and instantly start playing any game you want, just like Luna. There wouldn’t be these weird barriers to entry, and you wouldn’t have to worry about whether or not the game could be streamed. On PC, you can’t even use a mouse and keyboard to play some Game Pass games on the cloud, which just seems absurd. We need a streaming service that’s as simple and straightforward as Amazon Luna with the impressive library of Game Pass. One of these two companies needs to step up its game and fill the hole left behind by Stadia. Cloud gaming has so much potential, but these half-baked services are destroying its reputation before it ever gets a chance.
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