Amazon’s head of Fire TV, Kindle, and its new Luna cloud gaming service left the company this month. Marc Whitten joined Unity as manager of the company’s Unity Create business. Unity is a cross-platform game engine that many developers use to run their games on multiple devices.
Whitten’s departure, noticed by Matthew Ball on Twitter, comes less than six months after Amazon launched an early access version of Luna, the company’s new cloud gaming service. It also comes in the same month that Google announced it would be closing its own game development studios for Stadia. Stadia has left that on the wall, as it increasingly looks like Google will focus on licensing the underlying technology it has developed to industry partners.
Amazon’s Luna is currently available on PC, Mac, iOS, and Android, as long as you’ve been invited to try the service. Amazon has also expanded Luna to Fire TV devices without an invite, but it’s still limited to the US only at the moment. It’s not clear when Amazon plans to make Luna more widely available.
Whitten confirmed his departure from Amazon on Twitter yesterday“Of course I’m just digging at Unity, but it’s so nice to see the amount of energy, passion and love from the creator / user here,” he said.
Before arriving at Amazon, Whitten worked at Microsoft for 14 years to launch three Xbox consoles. Whitten left Microsoft in 2014 to take on the role of Chief Product Officer at the wireless audio company Sonos. He has overseen Fire TV, Amazon’s Kindle devices, and the launch of Luna for the past nearly five years.