Twitch Prime Rebranded Prime Gaming As Amazon Readies Project Tempo Game Streaming Launch
Twitch Prime received a facelift and a new name this week: Prime Gaming. This new name seems to be a play at combining extraneous brands under the Amazon Prime umbrella without making waves and changing much, but could it be a sign of an expansion of Amazon’s gaming division?
With this new branding, Amazon and Twitch are looking to expand their offering of free games and presumably draw in more “gaming-oriented” customers. It's also a possibility that Amazon's Project Tempo game streaming service will also be baked into Prime Gaming as a rival to Google Stadia and Microsoft's Project xCloud. The ability to have all gaming-oriented brands under one umbrella would seem to make the most sense, as their goals would be more succinct. The general manager of Prime Gaming, Larry Plotnick, stated that “…no matter what kind of games you love, and no matter where you play them, they’ll be even better with Prime Gaming.” At the end of the day, it seems the goal is to pair Prime Gaming with whatever game you play and on whatever platform, even if that happens to be on the yet-to-be released Project Tempo. As far as free content goes, the selection has not changed in this transitional period with a smattering of 43 offerings. Besides the existing partnerships with Rockstar Games, Riot Games, and Roblox Corp., we can only guess that more content will be coming soon as different game publishing companies get their own deals and agreements on the platform.
With this new branding, Amazon and Twitch are looking to expand their offering of free games and presumably draw in more “gaming-oriented” customers. It's also a possibility that Amazon's Project Tempo game streaming service will also be baked into Prime Gaming as a rival to Google Stadia and Microsoft's Project xCloud. The ability to have all gaming-oriented brands under one umbrella would seem to make the most sense, as their goals would be more succinct. The general manager of Prime Gaming, Larry Plotnick, stated that “…no matter what kind of games you love, and no matter where you play them, they’ll be even better with Prime Gaming.” At the end of the day, it seems the goal is to pair Prime Gaming with whatever game you play and on whatever platform, even if that happens to be on the yet-to-be released Project Tempo. As far as free content goes, the selection has not changed in this transitional period with a smattering of 43 offerings. Besides the existing partnerships with Rockstar Games, Riot Games, and Roblox Corp., we can only guess that more content will be coming soon as different game publishing companies get their own deals and agreements on the platform.
Aside from the free content, Twitch prime has other offerings as well. When Twitch Prime initially launched, users could link a Twitch account with Amazon Prime, obtaining access to ad-free viewing, a free monthly subscription, free games, game content, and more. Over the course of the last few years, the former Twitch Prime has made some changes, both good and bad. Since the beginning, a plethora of free games and DLC have been handed out to the delight of subscribers. On the other hand, in 2018, Amazon and Twitch made a bit of a ruckus when the ad-free viewing perk was pulled from Twitch Prime. No matter how you may feel about Twitch Prime/Prime Gaming, the name-change hopes to bring in a new era for the platform.
