Twitch Prime is no more: Amazon announced today that its premium Twitch package will now be known as Prime Gaming, with all the same benefits of Twitch Prime, but with more obviously-Amazon branding.
If you head over to gaming.amazon.com and compare it to twitch.amazon.com (for as long as that URL is still active), you'll notice that the two pages are virtually identical. That's because aside from the name, nothing has actually changed: Prime Gaming is included with Amazon Prime, it still offers free games and in-game loot every month, as well as the monthly Twitch channel subscription, emotes, and chat badges. But the name now aligns better with other Amazon services, like Prime Video and Prime Reading.
(Amazon Music is still an outlier, but maybe we'll see a change on that front soon too.)
Aside from branding alignment, the new name could also reflect a greater focus on games at Amazon. "If we're going to be in the devices business, we have to be thinking hard about games," Amazon Games VP Mike Frazzini said when Amazon acquired Twitch in 2014. "And at the center of that is the customer experience, which is what's so interesting about Twitch for us. Twitch has that same point of view. They think long term."
But while Twitch remains very game-centric, it's not just games: Other categories on the platform including Talk Shows and Podcasts, Art, ASMR, and "Just Chatting," which nearly 300,000 people are currently watching. It's definitely gaming-adjacent, but it's not purely gaming, and it may be that Amazon wants to mark Prime Gaming as something that's more than Twitch, and reinforce its commitment to videogames—or feels it needs to, given the wreck that was the Crucible launch and the multiple New World delays.
Prime Gaming is included with Amazon Prime, which means that along with all the game and Twitch stuff you'll also get free shipping on eligible products from Amazon, and access to Prime Video, Prime Music, and all sorts of ebooks and digital magazines. It goes for $13 per month (AU$7) or $120 per year (AU$59), with a free one-month trial.
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