Amazon Lunaservice is set to lose at least 45 games in December, as per its catalog listings. This development is yet another strong indication that the conglomerate’s game streaming platform is starting to lose significant momentum, as it dovetails with a recent report thatAmazon is cutting jobs in its Luna divisionas of this month.
Just over two years have passedsince Amazon announced Luna, but the service has been on shaky ground ever since the company went through a change of leadership less than a year following its foray into game streaming. Since then, new CEO Andy Jassy has been introducing increasingly more aggressive cost-cutting efforts on a company-wide basis in order to combat the post-pandemic market correction that erased more than half of Amazon’s peak $1.9 trillion valuation.
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Given howAmazon Luna currently features over 300 titlesavailable through different subscription tiers called channels, the dozens of games that are now confirmed to be leaving the platform over the course of the next month amount to nearly 15% of its catalog. Some of these outgoing titles are fairly niche indie offerings, but nearly a quarter of them are AAA games. While Amazon is still adding new titles to the Luna library on a regular basis, the volume of its monthly arrivals is significantly lower than this incoming December purge, which will void more than a quarter’s worth of expansion efforts.
Arguably the most notable removals belong to Sega, as the Japanese gaming giant is pulling bothYakuza 0andYakuza: Like A DragonfromAmazon Luna. Neither of its heaviest hitters on the platform were Luna launch titles;Yakuza 0was added to Amazon’s catalog in mid-2021, whileYakuza: Like A Dragonarrived less than a year ago and will now be removed from the Luna library two days short of its first-year anniversary on the platform. Whether the impending removals were prompted by Amazon’s cost-cutting efforts or Sega itself is unclear. The only other Sega game available on the service isAlien: Isolation, which doesn’t seem to be going anywhere at the moment.
The December list of outgoing Luna titles doesn’t include a single release from the platform’s single biggest supporter, Ubisoft. But the France-based gaming giant has a unique status in Amazon’s ecosystem, since it’s effectively using the streaming service as just another distribution avenue for its Netflix-like Ubisoft+ offering, which is available as part of a separateAmazon Luna Ubisoft+ channel.
