Amazon Luna Boss Leaves

The head of Amazon's new Luna streaming service has left the company. Marc Whitten, a longtime gaming executive who previously worked at Xbox, left Amazon this month to join another game company, Unity, as its SVP and GM.

Researcher Matthew Ball noticed Whitten's move and posted about it on Twitter.

Amazon Luna was announced in September 2020. At the time, Whitten sounded optimistic about Luna and its future, and that still may be the case even though he's left.

"We created Luna to make it easy to play great games on the devices customers already own and love," Whitten said at the time. "It's Day One for Luna--we are excited to work with gamers, streamers, and publishers like Ubisoft and Remedy Entertainment to build a great gaming experience for everyone."

Whitten worked at Amazon for nearly five years in the role of Vice President for Amazon Entertainment Devices and Services.

Prior to that, Whitten spent two years at the audio company Sonos. Before that, he worked at Microsoft as an executive on the Xbox team for more than 17 years.

Amazon Luna is positioned as a rival to Google Stadia and Microsoft's xCloud, allowing users to stream high-end video games over the cloud to a connected device.

Google's Stadia platform is undergoing changes, as Google recently announced the closure of its two internal game studios, impacting 150 jobs. The Stadia service remains operational and new games are coming to the platform all the time--100+ new games are coming in 2021 alone. As for xCloud, Microsoft's streaming service aims to extend the appeal of Xbox far beyond the console and PC to help reach a much bigger audience.