Is the catalog staying fresh or is it just inconsistent?
Luna, Amazon’s cloud game streaming service, is set to lose 53 games this month, including titles like Bridge Constructor Portal, No More Heroes, and classics like Pong and Missile Command, according to 9to5Google. It’s just the latest mass removal from the service.
Amazon previously told 9to5Google that its goal for Luna “has always been to keep our selection as fresh as possible and to offer a wide array of high-quality, immersive games for our customers” and that it’s “refreshing” the service’s content with that in mind.
It does seem like the number of games on Luna can fluctuate a lot — it also dropped over 40 games in December, according to Cloud Dosage.
Currently, the Luna Plus subscription offers around 200 games, though the removals are set to happen at 11:59PM on February 8th, 10th, 26th, and 27th. In January Game Rant listed that Luna Plus had around 190 games, which was up from the approximately 140 that the list had in November 2022. (Though it’s worth noting that, in December, Amazon folded the separate Luna Retro and Family subscriptions into Luna Plus.) Even if there were no new games being added in February and the catalog dropped down to 150, that’d still be more than there were when Luna officially launched last March, which was around 130, according to Game Rant.
Still, if I were a Luna customer, I’d want its catalog to grow over time rather than go through cycles of expanding and shrinking. As 9to5Google notes, Google’s Stadia had a solid record of keeping games around — though, given how things turned out for that service, it’s probably not wise to use it as the gold standard for how a game streaming service should work.
However, most consumers are familiar with fairly steady libraries from other streaming services outside of games. While Netflix et al. often drop shows and pick up new ones, they generally add more content than they take away. Plus, it’s hard to imagine Spotify dropping a quarter of its catalog, though game streaming services trade more on having a good slate of content than being a mostly complete library for the entire medium.
