This was basically buried under the rest of The Game Awards announcements, but it was just added to the service a day or two ago.
Amazon Luna specifically uses Windows combined with specialized Nvidia GPUs designed for servers, though they do seem to be considering a move to Linux-based servers combined with a Proton compatibility layer, either of which would make it an incredibly easy "port"....
....If the game was actually released on PC as intended.
Amazon doesn't typically get exclusives like this on the service, the closest was the first two No More Heroes games. But even that was quickly shuffled onto Steam about 4 months later.
General evidence suggests the Johnny & Associates veto happened very late in development.
- A PC port of the game was one of the few titles in the Geforce Now leak to have non-placeholder data on it, including screenshots. It also had the release date set to the same day as the PS5/Xbox Series version, if i remember correctly.
- The official site for the game initially labeled the Stadia (more on this later) logo as being a "Steam" logo in the site source.
- A 2019 interview from series producer Kazuki Hosokawa said they were actively considering bringing the game over to PC (and "other formats"), this was back when they were still gradually porting the whole Yakuza (Kiwami 2 was ported a month after the interview, and 5 was ported to PS4 2 months later, in case you need an idea of the time period.) series over. So it made sense for them to hold off at the time.
The iconic "Real X use a gamepad" screen, while Luna does support Keyboard & Mouse. You're generally expected to be using a controller on the service. and the screen doesn't appear in the Stadia build despite it also supporting Keyboard & Mouse.
An "exit game" option, i believe this is just down to how Luna works. But it's still somewhat notable.
Some of the earlier Ryu Ga Gotoku studio ports mapped exiting the game to a button (Y) or key, but Like A Dragon moved it into being a menu option.
and before you ask, they at least scrubbed out the PC settings you'd normally expect. Taking the audio settings that existed in the console builds out with it.
(footage provided by WiNDStaR715)
As for how the Stadia build fits into all of this, my assumption is that once the situation with Takuya Kimura happened. SEGA ended up taking a deal with Google knowing that it would be the closest to getting the PC build out there prior to Amazon stepping in. Their rather unusual support of Stadia shows signs of this. As at least two of the games they put on there started as PC exclusives with the Stadia version shortly after, and didn't get proper console ports until later on.
The fact that, as cloud gaming services. Viewing and/or modifying the actual game data would be impossible also satisfies the main factor that Johnny's was refusing to budge on, which was fears of people using Kimura's character model outside of the game.
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