By Nelson Schneider - 04/12/26 at 02:59 PM CT
Remember Google’s disastrous attempt at transforming gaming into a Cloud-based experience? Remember how it flopped after a single year and how Google kept it going as a backend service for a while after that before shutting it down altogether?
Well, apparently, Amazon thought they could do better when they launched their Luna game streaming service. Presumably the online retail titan thought they already had the gaming rep needed to launch such an endeavor due to having a de-facto monopoly on the other kind of game streaming through their Twitch platform. Amazon even tried partnering with the (sometimes inexplicably) well-liked DRM-free PC game shop, GOG.com, in order to help new Luna users flesh out their streamable libraries with a bunch of dubiously-Good, definitely-Old, Games.
Too bad for Amazon, but great news for us: Luna has been a complete failure and will be going away on June 10, 2026. Amazon has officially stopped selling new games through the Luna interface, and any games “owned” only through the Luna interface will go away completely with the service. No refunds.
Fortunately for those foolish enough to invest in Luna gaming, there is an out: If you’ve linked other storefronts to your Luna account, such as Uplay and Origin, you will still get to keep co-licensed games on those platforms. Still, that’s not much of a consolation prize.
When will Big Tech and Industrial Gaming companies realize that they’re trying to sell us products and services – especially services – we don’t want? This egregious rent-seeking behavior is causing all of tech to give itself a black eye simply because they are no longer interested in making boatloads of money by creating and selling great products that everyone wants, but instead wish to bring in perpetual revenue by transforming products into services and charging perpetual rent for things that exist entirely in their own Cloud-based computing infrastructure. Customers DO NOT WANT this.
