Our Take
Amazon's gaming strategy is finally legible: phone-based Luna games for casual players plus IP leverage from Prime Video and MGM, but the company is still building toward a bet that won't clear for 18+ months.
Why it matters
Amazon controls massive IP (Bond, Tomb Raider, sports rights) and the distribution channel (Prime subscriptions). If Luna gains traction with casual audiences, it becomes a test case for whether a hyperscaler can break into the gaming market through breadth rather than exclusives.
Do this week
Gaming business leads: audit your IP roadmap against Amazon's cross-media play. If you control TV or film rights, sketch what a companion game strategy could do to go-to-market costs and attach rates by end of Q1.
Amazon unified gaming under one leader and narrowed focus to casual Luna games
Amazon Games consolidated three separate divisions—Prime Gaming, Amazon Game Studios, and Luna—into a single organization under Jeff Gattis, a former Xbox executive who joined in March 2025. The company had been unfocused: acquiring Twitch, launching Luna (a cloud gaming service) six years ago, and investing heavily in MMOs during the live-service boom. That effort produced little revenue impact.
Under Gattis, the structure now mirrors Xbox: Luna is the platform; Amazon Game Studios is the development and publishing arm. Luna itself offers two tiers: party games bundled with Prime (including an AI-powered title featuring Snoop Dogg as a judge) and a $9.99/month Luna Premium tier with a wider catalog.
Amazon has 10 to 15 games currently in development, with 33–40 percent targeting AAA budgets (per Gattis). The flagship titles are Tomb Raider remakes: "Legacy of Atlantis" and "Catalyst," both scheduled for 2027. A live-action Tomb Raider show starring Sophie Turner is also in development for Prime Video.
IP cross-sell and casual gaming are the real bet, not console competition
Amazon is no longer chasing core gamers. That market is "well-served" by PlayStation, Xbox, and Steam, Gattis told The Verge. Instead, Amazon is targeting casual audiences via phone-based party games that require no dedicated console.
The deeper strategy is IP leverage. Gattis explicitly positioned games as mandatory tie-ins for major franchises. "Every major IP is going to have to have a video game story" as part of its go-to-market strategy, he said. Amazon now controls James Bond outright and is treating the franchise as a test case: IO Interactive's recently-released 007 First Light was self-published before Amazon acquired the Bond rights, but the company will likely publish the next Bond game through Amazon Game Studios, not an external partner.
Amazon also holds rights deals with the NBA and NFL, opening a channel for sports companion games. And the Tomb Raider show-plus-games strategy demonstrates the company's bet that the line between TV and games is collapsing. If Tomb Raider lands on Prime Video, Luna, and Amazon.com (merchandise), it becomes a unified franchise funnel.
However, execution risk is acute. Netflix has invested heavily in games and still hasn't broken through as a gaming publisher. Amazon's new focus is clearer than its prior direction, but the company is still hedging: party games for scale, AAA titles for prestige, AI-powered games for speed, and sports/film tie-ins for distribution. That is a lot of bets for a company that hasn't yet proven it can ship a hit consumer game.
Expect Amazon to bundle games with Prime memberships and cross-promote aggressively
The company's structural advantage is subscription reach. Prime has hundreds of millions of members worldwide. Games bundled with Prime subscriptions, combined with Prime Video content and Amazon.com merchandising, create a closed loop that traditional game publishers cannot replicate. Watch whether Luna Premium (the paid tier) gains meaningful traction by late 2026, before the Tomb Raider titles launch.
The Snoop Dogg AI-powered game shipped in under a year, per Gattis, and Amazon is bullish on generative AI as a development tool (not a job cutter, the company says). This may become a cost lever: faster iteration and lower production time for casual-tier games could let Amazon scale party titles faster than traditional studios.
Do not assume the next Bond game will ship on console platforms first. Gattis did not rule out Luna exclusivity or timed exclusivity deals. If Amazon publishes the next Bond game and keeps it on Luna + Prime Video tie-ins for 6–12 months, that would be a significant signal about the company's willingness to sacrifice traditional platform reach for subscription lock-in.