- Amazon gaming boss thinks soaring hardware prices could push more hardcore gamers to cloud streaming services
- He argued that the price of consoles increasing by “six, seven times” would mean some players would be “priced out of the market”.
- He thinks the RAM crisis and rising prices won’t ‘go away anytime soon’
Jeff Gattis, Amazon’s general manager of gaming, thinks the rising cost of consoles and PC components could push more hardcore gamers toward cloud streaming, through services such as Amazon’s Luna.
In a recent interview about the service, I asked whether Gattis predicted cloud gaming would become a more popular option for major players as traditional systems become much more expensive.
“Yes. I wouldn’t have said that 18 months ago, and I will say that our business model is not really based on this massive shift where everyone is ditching their console and their PC and moving to the cloud,” he said.
“But damn, when you start seeing Steam Machine prices and PlayStation and Xbox rumors. As you get to $1,000, $1,500 worth of hardware […] you’re going to see more people excluded from the market. They will consider other technologies.”
Gattis, who previously led platform and subscriptions at Xbox, then shared an anecdote to illustrate just how much prices have increased.
“I was telling someone the other day that when I was back at Xbox a few years ago, we had our Series S console on sale. [for a] vacation. I think it was around $199. When you think that in the space of two or three years, we’ve gone from $200 to what will probably be six, seven times that price.
“I understand this is an AMR crisis, it’s global, but I don’t think it’s going to go away anytime soon.”
He was careful to point out, however, that moving hardcore gamers to the cloud is not an integral part of Amazon’s strategy: “It’s not our strategy to accelerate that, but it’s a good tailwind if it happens, and it’s realistic to think it could happen.”
The comments come as Amazon rolls out a Fire TV update that gives Amazon Prime subscribers the ability to stream games like Fallout 4 Or Fortnite directly from Prime Video via Luna in an effort to draw more attention to the service.
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