By Elise Favis
Washington - Twitch Prime, a premium membership on the Amazon-owned streaming platform Twitch, is being re-branded as Prime Gaming in an effort to broaden its appeal. Available in over 200 countries and territories, Prime Gaming comes included with an Amazon Prime membership and/or a Prime Video subscription.
Prime Gaming users receive monthly free games and in-game loot (for popular games like Grand Theft Auto Online, Apex Legends, Red Dead Redemption 2, and more) as members. This is similar to how the service was with Twitch Prime. Twitch-specific benefits remain the same too, including the premium chat badge and extra emoticons. Going forward, however, Amazon is dropping Twitch from the program's name. (Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
"It has nothing negative to do about Twitch," said Larry Plotnick, director of Prime Gaming. "We love Twitch. We're still very deeply partnered with them. But the goal here is really to reach as broad of an audience as possible, reach as many gamers as possible."
Twitch Prime originally launched in 2016, and Plotnick said it had a focus on "predominantly core gamers." The name change is part of an overall platform-agnostic vision of including different gamers who play on different devices. Quietly, over the last few years, that's already begun with the inclusion of more mobile games (like in-game content for Yahtzee With Buddies) and other titles across various platforms.
Prime Gaming will soon add more family-friendly titles to its roster, too, including "Roblox." Users will get to keep these PC games permanently, even if they cancel their subscription.
"Today, we have over 50 pieces of content available to customers, 30 pieces of content for in-game and another 20 free games that people can go can download and keep forever," Plotnick said. "And so those are the big changes."
The Washington Post