With $1,000 Consoles On The Horizon, Amazon Games Boss Offers A Solution That Absolutely No One Asked For
Amazon Games’ boss Jeff Gattis has a solution for the rising cost of console gaming, but it’s certainly one that nobody wants and hasn’t been successful thus far: cloud gaming. Let’s hear him out real quick.
In a July 23 interview with the BBC, Gattis talked about what the future of gaming could look like as consoles soar past $1,000. Although he acknowledged how important systems are to the industry as a whole, he also noticed an untapped market beyond traditional consoles that Amazon Games has been trying to reach.
“There are somewhere between 2.5 and 3 billion people who play games around the world, but only a fraction of those own dedicated gaming hardware,” Gattis said. “As hardware becomes more expensive, and as streaming technology continues to improve, I think you’ll naturally see more people asking whether they actually need that dedicated device.”
He reiterated this point to The Game Business on July 23. In a lengthy interview, Gattis said that Amazon isn’t attempting to supplant consoles or PCs, but rather, to give players yet another option to play their games that doesn’t make them decide between this month’s rent and the next PlayStation or Xbox system.
“Our business isn’t predicated on replacing consoles,” Gattis said. “Historically, cloud gaming has been a little bit of a solution in search of a problem. Consoles, for the most part, have been relatively inexpensive until now. So, our business is more about reaching more players and expanding the market, not trying to get people to give up their consoles or gaming PCs.”
For Gattis, cloud gaming is that option. He believes that, as the technology around cloud gaming continues to advance, Amazon can capitalize on the market of underserved players who want to game but don’t want to spend a fortune on it.
“Having said all that, we saw the Steam Machine opening at $1,000. We hear rumors about consoles, because of the RAM crisis, pushing up over $1,000 in Gen 10. So, I do think you get to a point at which more people will be in the consideration set for a cloud gaming solution, just because of the sheer cost of buying dedicated hardware.”
He then spoke about developers and publishers, adding that if Amazon can target the “two and a half billion audience that I think is a little underserved,” maybe developers and publishers would see Luna as a viable platform to release games on.
“The [skepticism] you’ll hear is, ‘Well, if I put my games on Luna, particularly if we push it into Prime, I’m going to cannibalize all my sales on these other platforms,'” Gattis said. “And the reality is, at least the pitch that we keep making–and it is the truth–is that this is about reaching players that a lot of those games are never going to be able to reach. Particularly in a world of $1,000 consoles.”
This is all very interesting in the context of cloud gaming. Sure, PlayStation and Xbox have their own offerings that appear to be successful for their business, but Google Stadia shut down in 2023 and Amazon Luna was folded into the larger Amazon Prime subscription service in 2025. Console gaming is getting more expensive, with price increases coming to the Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S this year. The Steam Deck is also getting a price hike, and Valve’s $1,000 Steam Machine has certainly turned some heads. But cloud gaming isn’t as reliable as a console, primarily due to the internet’s potential instability.
If, for whatever reason, your internet goes down or access to the cloud gaming servers becomes unavailable, then you won’t be able to game. Speaking from personal experience, even when my Spectrum internet service is interrupted–because of some regularly occurring outage–I’m still able to play single-player games I’ve downloaded on my console like AI Limit and Lords of the Fallen. The same can’t be said of cloud gaming.
That’s not to say that cloud gaming can’t or won’t ever be viable. There just likely needs to be more work done on reliability and stability to ensure that there’s no latency and continued accessibility.
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