Amazon quietly launches Prime Gaming in India

Amazon has quietly rolled out Prime Gaming, its subscription service that offers access to a number of titles, to its members in India weeks after it started testing the service in the South Asian market.

The gaming service, complimentary to Amazon Prime and Video subscribers, offers users access to a range of mobile, PC and Mac games as well as in-game loot at no additional cost. Each month, the e-commerce group adds a number of new titles to the service.

At the time of writing, some of the free games and their loot boxes available to users in India include League of Legends, DeathLoop, Quake, COD Season 1, EA Madden 23, FIFA 23, Apex Legends, Destiny 2, and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons.

Prime Gaming home page in India. (Image: TechCrunch)

Prime Gaming makes Amazon Prime subscription, which costs just $18 a year in India, even more enticing for a certain demographic in the South Asian market. It can also have some “fascinating long-term impact” for PC gaming ecosystem in India, said Rishi Alwani, a long-time industry analyst and communications manager at Pune-headquartered gaming upstart SuperGaming

“It would expose Indian PC gamers with Prime subscriptions to a variety of content they would not necessarily have gravitated towards. By and large, the Indian PC games space is value-driven permeated by either big budget ‘safe’ AAA fare like GTA 5 or free-to-play shooters like Valorant. Prime Gaming brings in a varied, curated selection of genres and titles that many may have not even considered to pick up and play otherwise such as Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons,” he told TechCrunch in a text.

“Throw in in-game content for popular titles like Modern Warfare 2 and Apex Legends and it’s pretty obvious that Amazon India’s at that phase where it is looking at gaming to retain its burgeoning Prime subscriber base.”

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.