Amazon’s Luna boss leaves five months after its reveal

The head of Amazon’s cloud gaming service Luna has left the company just five months after it was officially announced.

Marc Whitten was Amazon’s VP of Entertainment Devices and Services, but quietly left this month to become Senior Vice President and General Manager at Unity’s Create Solutions department.

The move was noticed on Twitter by strategist Matthew Ball, who also pointed out that Whitten’s move is particularly interesting because it involves a move from a cloud gaming service to a business that specialises in local processing.

Just to make this more clear, Head of Amazon’s cloud gaming division moved to a gaming business focused on local processing https://t.co/4a3fQqZ4Vv

— Matthew Ball (@ballmatthew) February 24, 2021

The news comes amidst disruption at Stadia, Luna’s Google-owned rival. Earlier this month Google stated plans to close down all of Stadia’s internal game development teams and focus instead on third-party partnerships.

Luna was officially announced in September 2020 as a rival to Stadia and Microsoft‘s xCloud.

The cloud gaming service is powered by the Amazon Web Service infrastructure and allows users to stream games at up to 4K/60fps on multiple devices including Fire TV, PC, Mac and iOS (through a browser), with Android to come at a later date.

The system will offer its users a variety of paid channels, which they can subscribe to and access various libraries of games.

These include the Luna+ game channel (which is included with the base subscription and includes the likes of Resident Evil 7, Control and Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair), and the Ubisoft channel, which gives player access to Ubisoft’s new games on the day of release.

Luna is still in the early access stage at the moment, and only US customers are able to request an invite.

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