Amazon Luna is absorbing Prime Gaming and getting controller-free games in the process

After a few years of mostly humming along^[1] in the background^[2], Amazon’s game streaming service is receiving a bit of an update. Amazon Luna will still act as a game streaming service with a rotating library of free games for Prime users, but now, Amazon also plans^[3] to offer “GameNight,” a collection of social party games that you can play with your friends with just a smartphone. The expansion is about more than just new games: Amazon’s Prime Gaming^[4] brand is now also part of Luna.

Amazon says the new GameNight collection includes over 25 multiplayer games, some that are reinterpretations of classic games like Angry Birds, Exploding Kittens or Ticket to Ride, and others that are entirely original and developed by Amazon, like Courtroom Chaos: Starring Snoop Dogg. If you’ve played any of Jackbox’s various multiplayer games, GameNight seems to use a similar setup. You load up the game in Luna, whoever’s playing scans an onscreen QR code with their phone and then they can join the game using their device as a controller.

The hope is that these smartphone-controlled games will lower the barrier to entry for anyone intimidated by a controller, or who hasn’t already taken advantage of Luna as part of their Prime subscription. For everyone else, though, Amazon says the service is getting a collection of new high-profile games in the near future, including Indiana Jones and the Great Circle^[5], Kingdom Come: Deliverance II and Dave the Diver^[6]. As before, if you’re willing to pay for one of Amazon’s add-on subscriptions you can add even more games to your library, too. Unlike GameNight games, though, all of these titles will require a controller to play, whether it’s Amazon’s Luna Controller or a Bluetooth controller connected to the Luna app.

As far as Prime Gaming is concerned, Amazon’s not retiring the benefits of the plan, but rather using them to bolster Luna. Prime Gaming launched as Twitch Prime, a program that unlocked unique emotes, one free Twitch sub and free PC games every month if you linked your Twitch and Amazon accounts. Those benefits will still be available after Prime Gaming is retired, and Twitch says that any free PC games you redeem will be available “wherever Amazon Prime is available as part of Luna Standard.” That includes regions where you can’t stream Luna yet.

While confusing, adding more games and folding Prime Gaming into Luna suggests that Amazon views the service as the gaming project it’s prioritizing moving forward. It doesn’t have the library of Xbox Cloud Gaming^[7] and it’s not clear if Amazon is as gun-ho about streaming as Microsoft is, but if the company is willing to pay, offering more games and more ways to play them seems like a good move.

Update, October 1 2025, 6:07PM ET: The story and its headline have been updated to include details about Amazon’s changes to Prime Gaming.