Amazon implements “Play on Luna” button in Twitch, achieving Google’s original Stadia vision

Amazon Luna is taking a page out of Google Stadia’s cloud gaming playbook. Amazon has implemented the “Play on Luna” button in Twitch, another streaming service it owns.

The Nerf Report host/producer Bryant Chappel showed off the feature on YouTube yesterday after fellow content creator Vet Cloud Gaming spotted it while he was on vacation on February 10. The “Play on Luna” feature allows Twitch viewers to instantly play the same games they’re seeing their favorite streamers play on the service. However, the button will only work if they’re subscribed to Amazon Luna.

According to 9to5Google, Amazon teased the idea when it announced Luna back in 2020. Its pitch went like this: “Inside the Luna experience, players will see Twitch streams for games in the service, and from Twitch, they’ll be able to instantly start playing Luna games.”

When Google Stadia was announced in 2019, Google said that the service would implement a “Play Now” button at the end of a video game trailer or gameplay video on YouTube. The only features to come out of Stadia in the last two and a half years were State Share, which allows content creators to share links to screenshots or video clips of their gameplay with their viewers, and Crowd Play, which lets viewers jump in and play certain multiplayer games with their favorite streamers. It has failed to deliver the very feature it promised that would allow players to play games like Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla in their entirety after watching trailers or gameplay videos on YouTube.