Early this morning (or defeated last night, depending on your sleep schedule) Rod “Slasher” Breslau, an ordinary filterer, won a package of seized data from a Twitch spouse on a big call and logo replacement where Twitch Prime will now be known as “Prime Gaming”, spent most sleep today.
The wonderful logo consultant describes what Prime Gaming is now, which doesn’t look like another Twitch Prime, and this update turns out to be primarily cosmetic. But the general purpose is to align the service more with other offers like Prime Video and Prime Music, either in terms of names, but also to focus on pieces like loose games that other people can stay or opportunities for loose content in the game. . (this already exists through Twitch Prime).
There are some fun things in the guide, namely a segment about Prime Gaming’s “emotional benefits” that includes a “sense of the price of the most complete and successful subscription service”. Wow, a subscription service? It must be a deal.
Most of the public attention on Prime Gaming this morning before the official announcement later this afternoon is how it doesn’t actually come out of the language like Twitch Prime. Twitch Prime has connected so many times and therefore through streamers (it’s a massive money gain for them) that has become a meme on the net (“Have you heard of our lord and savior Twitch Prime?”) And converting memes is not extraordinarily easy.
But if so, it turns out that the logo is being simplified in Prime Video and Prime Music, I think the main explanation for why this update is something that hasn’t happened yet: the arrival of the Amazon game streaming service that AWS will use to stream. Games. directly on devices like Google Stadia and Microsoft xCloud now. And when that happens, I have to be firmly under the slogan “Prime Gaming”.
The problem is that for now, the service, codenamed Project Tempo, has been delayed. It was originally supposed to either debut or at least be announced by this fall, but last we heard about it back in April 2020 was that it had been delayed until some time in 2021 via a NYT article that spotlighted that Amazon was “making games, not just streaming them,” highlighting titles Crucible and New World.
Well, observers will know that Amazon has had a very tough time breaking into the gaming world outside of acquiring Twitch and its market share. Crucible was such a disaster that the game took the unprecedented step of going back into a closed alpha after it debuted and simply no one showed up. New World, an MMO, isn’t out yet, was supposed to launch in two weeks and has now been delayed until spring 2021. The game has changed direction so many times it’s hard to know where it stands now, and it does not look terribly promising.
But game streaming is all amazon theoretically deserves to be able to do well with all its infrastructure. However, the gaming streaming market has not yet become truly extensive and viable. Google Stadia has struggled to make a big effect have a big impact since its inception, with a limited catalog of games and a limited use case when streaming games is really necessary. Microsoft’s xCloud has the ability to find more good fortune, as it’s related to Game Pass and the Xbox ecosystem. But Project Tempo/Prime Gaming will look more like Stadia, with no backing. Google has started creating leading studios to create exclusive Stadia games in order to make the service more attractive and yet it’s anything, as mentioned, Amazon has already tried it, and it’s not going well.
So yes, for now Prime Gaming will be announced mainly as a rebrand of Twitch Prime, but I would expect Amazon to continue to expand its gaming ambitions no matter what setbacks it faces, and Prime Gaming a year from now could be very different than what it is this afternoon.
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I write about video games, television, movies and the internet.