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The console industry is far from dead, but it is facing challenging times – and that applies to all manufacturers, by the way.
Outside of rising prices and an ageing audience, I personally find it fascinating how the PS5 increasingly finds itself locked in an attention war with social media, streaming services, and other entertainment options.
Here’s the reality Sony is increasingly facing: the more time people spend scrolling on Instagram or binging on series via Netflix, the less time they’re playing PS5. And the less time they’re playing, the less money they’re likely to be spending.
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It’s an interesting predicament, and I wonder what the top-brass at PlayStation thinks of Amazon’s latest announcement.
In short, it’s integrating its Amazon Luna streaming service into Amazon Prime to increase the visibility of its gaming platform.
Here’s what it says:
“Billions of people play games, but only a few hundred million own a console or gaming-ready PC. For everyone else, costs and commitments have kept them on the sidelines. Luna is built for these players, offering immersive games you can play in seconds, as easy to find as the shows and movies you already watch, and on devices you already own.”
In other words, Amazon Fire TVs have now become a conduit for hundreds of on-demand games – no expensive PlayStation required.
Now I think we can all agree that there are drawbacks to this solution: latency and image quality are still very real issues with cloud streaming. I certainly wouldn’t want to play Street Fighter 6 competitively on one of these.
But I’ve been testing PS Plus Premium’s cloud streaming a lot lately, and I tell you what, it’s pretty good for a lot of games. Certainly for a casual experience, anyway.
It’s worth noting that Amazon Luna is populated by some pretty big games, like Hogwarts Legacy, EA Sports FC 26, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
It’s also got some more casual fare, like Ticket to Ride, which I suspect would probably be popular in this format. You can attach a controller to play, or use your smartphone.
And crucially, the entire service is included with Amazon Prime, so there’s no extra cost at all.
Now look, I’m not saying this is going to eat PS5’s lunch overnight – it’s not.
But at a time when consoles are getting more expensive – through no fault of Sony, I would like to stress – this is just another very real challenge the Japanese giant is going to have to navigate.