Amazon has done something that Google either couldn’t or subsequently decided not to do. That is to increase the integration between its cloud gaming service and its video platform by making the games on the gaming service directly accessible from the company’s video platform. As first spotted by Vet Cloud Gaming, then shared in a tweet by Bryant Chappel, Amazon has added a new “Play on Luna” button to Twitch.
The “Play on Luna” button on Twitch will only appear if you have an active subscription to Amazon’s cloud gaming service, Luna. If you do have a Luna subscription, as demonstrated by Vet Cloud Gaming, you can go to Twitch and search for a game. If the game is accessible on Luna, you will notice a new “Play on Luna” button next to the Follow button when you open the searched game’s page on Twitch.
When you click the “Play on Luna” button, you will see that Twitch will directly open the Luna app and start the game for you without the need to take any further action. You simply click on the “Play on Luna” button and play the game.
Luna subscribers can already watch Twitch streams in Luna, and with the new “Play on Luna” button, Amazon fully fulfilled a promise that it made back in 2020 when it announced its Luna cloud gaming service. In 2020, Amazon stated, “Inside the Luna experience, players will see Twitch streams for games in the service, and from Twitch, they’ll be able to instantly start playing Luna games.”
Google wanted to do the same thing that Amazon did with its “Play on Luna” button. When Google announced Stadia, its cloud gaming service, Google stated that it planned to introduce a way to start playing a game on Stadia directly from the game’s trailer on YouTube only by pressing a button on the video platform.
Google also wanted to enable Stadia subscribers to join a multiplayer game via a streamer’s YouTube channel—but for Google, none of that ever happened, and now Amazon seems to have started picking up the slack.