History of video games/Platforms/Luna

History
Amazon had been making strategic acquisitions which analysts suspected was a move to be getting into the home gaming industry since at least 2014. In particular roumors of a home game console developed by Amazon Lab 126.

Amazon Luna was announced in late September 2020.

Early access to the Amazon Luna service began on October 20th, 2020.

The business model Luna uses appears to be a monthly fee for access to a library of games.

In March of 2023 the service launched in Canada, UK, and Germany.

Compute
At launch Luna is intended to run on AWS EC2 G4 instances using Intel Cascade Lake CPUs, T4 GPUs made by NVIDIA, and a Windows operating system. Luna instances are expected to have about 8.1 teraflops of performance.

Software
The service had close integration with Twitch game streaming.

Controller
The Amazon Luna controller lowered latency by using Wi-Fi to bypass the client device and connect more directly to the server.

Alternatively, a smartphone could also be used as a controller.