Amazon continues its steady rebrand of the Twitch platform to one that's exclusively focused on its own, with a new renaming of the Twitch Prime subscription to just Prime Gaming. This makes sense, in that Twitch Prime was always included with Amazon Prime subscriptions as part of its major offering of free postage, free book access, exclusive discounts, and more. But it does represent a further killing-off of the Twitch brand, which has been underplayed since Amazon's takeover.
This move is mainly cosmetic, although it does have a new official web page. There you'll find that the package itself remains unchanged, with free monthly games, one free channel subscription per month, ad free viewing on Twitch, and bonus loot and unlocks in a variety of games.
This move likely comes as a shift towards greater gaming developments for Amazon, which has diversified in a variety of directions in recent years, but none more so than gaming. Alongside its Twitch buy, and now shift towards Prime Gaming, Amazon has been developing its own games. The first effort, Crucible, was a huge flop, quickly losing support among players and was pulled from digital stores less than three months after release to retool and rework it, despite years of development and millions spent.
Amazon has another few new games under development, so this won't be its last attempt at breaking into the industry. Prime Gaming will no doubt serve as a powerful promotional tool for any such efforts moving forward.
