Amazon Luna will offer controller-free party games in an attempt to woo Prime subscribers

After a few years of mostly humming along in the background, Amazon's game streaming service is receiving an update. Amazon Luna will still act as a game streaming service with a rotating library of free games for Prime users, but now, Amazon also plans to offer "GameNight," a collection of social party games that you can play with your friends with just a smartphone.

Luna's GameNight collection includes over 25 multiplayer games, some that are reinterpretations of classic games like Angry Birds, Exploding Kittens or Ticket to Ride, and others that are entirely original and developed by Amazon, like Courtroom Chaos: Starring Snoop Dogg. If you've played any of Jackbox's various multiplayer games, GameNight seems to use a similar setup. You load up the game in Luna, whoever's playing scans an onscreen QR code with their phone and then they can join the game using their device as a controller.

Amazon hopes these smartphone-controlled games will lower the barrier to entry for anyone intimidated by a controller, or who hasn't already taken advantage of Luna as part of their Prime subscription. For everyone else, though, the company says the service is getting a collection of new high-profile games in the near future, including Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II and Dave the Diver. As before, if you're willing to pay for one of Amazon's add-on subscriptions you can add even more games to your library, too. Unlike GameNight games, though, all of these titles will require a controller to play, whether it's Amazon's Luna Controller or a Bluetooth controller connected to the Luna app.

While not a radical reinterpretation of Luna, Amazon is at least trying to differentiate the service from something like Xbox Cloud Gaming or Google's failed Stadia service. It's not clear if game streaming is as important to Amazon as it is to Microsoft, but if the company is willing to pay, offering more games and more ways to play them seems like a good move.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/amazon-luna-will-offer-controller-free-party-games-in-an-attempt-to-woo-prime-subscribers-130004416.html?src=rss