As Amazon looks to expand its influence in gaming beyond the purple borders of its extremely popular live-streaming service, Twitch, the company is officially rebranding the Twitch Prime subscription service to Prime Gaming.
Despite the name change name, Prime Gaming is mostly staying the same. You’ll continue to get perks like free in-game loot and cosmetics for titles including GTA: Online, League of Legends, Apex Legends, and more, in addition to a rotating lineup of free game downloads via Games with Prime, with August’s free game lineup including hits like Metal Slug 2, SNK 40th Anniversary Collection, Shaq Fu(!), and others.
Prime Gaming access is available to anyone subscribed to Amazon Prime, which grants access to an ever-growing portfolio of services that includes Prime Video, Amazon Music, Prime Reading, and all the other things you get as part of Amazon Prime (free two-day shipping and grocery delivery from Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods among them).
Twitch regulars should know that Prime Gaming will also still include one free Twitch channel subscription per month, so those constant reminders from streamers begging people to use up their free Twitch sub probably aren’t going away anytime soon.
Amazon didn’t specify why the name change, but ostensibly the move is to broaden the appeal of Amazon Prime’s gaming perks, expanding it from something that sounded like it was focused mainly on Twitch and streaming culture to something that gamers of all sorts can get some use out of.
Amazon has not announced any official details about Prime Gaming’s future, but after seeing the expansion of the Epic Game Store, I anticipate that Amazon will release its own dedicated game store/launcher within the next couple of years as a way to sell both third-party titles and first-party games like Crucible, while also giving Amazon a platform to host its long-rumored cloud gaming service in order to better compete with the likes of Google’s Stadia, Nvidia’s GeForce Now, and Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.