I’m still mourning the loss of Google Stadia - not so much what it was, but what it could 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.
Luna isn’t as accessible as Stadia was. You can 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.
It also has Stadia’s fatal flaw: no games. There are 146 games on Luna, not including the Ubisoft titles you can stream if you also have an Ubisoft+ subscription, and they’re mostly old indies and retro games. There are some great titles on there like Alien: Isolation, Resident Evil 2 Remake, and SteamWorld Dig 2, but I don't think there’s a single game on Luna that came out in the last two years. It does have just about every licensed kart racer out there, including Garfield Kart: Furious Racing, if that’s what you’re into. But Stadia proved you can’t be successful without games. It's cool that Luna has a couch co-op feature that lets you play with your friends even if they don’t subscribe to Luna, and the Twitch integration seems well done, but it’s not enough. Luna needs a giant, ever-growing library like the one that Game Pass has.
As great as the Game Pass library is, Microsoft’s streaming services are way behind the times. As a Game Pass Ultimate subscriber, I have access to Game Pass on PC, mobile, and Xbox consoles, but it’s hard to know which games are available where, and even harder to figure out which ones you can stream. The library is heavily segmented, and there’s no telling if you’ll be able to pause your game on Xbox and pick up where you left off on your phone until you try. Each platform has different compatibility too. Mobile only offers streaming, while Xbox console offers a combination of both. On PC, there’s no way to stream games from the Game Pass app. Microsoft hides PC streaming on the Game Pass website, which isn’t totally surprising, because it’s just not very good. Game Pass streaming works well enough on a tiny phone, but every game I’ve streamed through the browser looks muddy and pixelated, like it’s set on the lowest setting possible.
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.