Amazon Prime members who are also video game fans now have yet another reason to renew their subscriptions: Twitch Prime.
The new add-on offers Prime members discounts on new and pre-release games and the ability to play a rotating selection of games for free. They also get the equivalent of Twitch Turbo, the streaming site's current premium offering, which includes ad-free viewing, custom emotes, special badges and colors for chats, and one free Twitch channel subscription each month.
Twitch Prime is available to all Amazon Prime members in the US, Canada, UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain. Prime Student members, who pay half of the $99 per year subscription fee, will also get the Twitch features.
Amazon, which paid nearly $1 billion for Twitch in 2014, is exploring ways to branch out Twitch's offerings beyond video games, including streaming the Democratic and Republican conventions this summer. Bringing Twitch into the Amazon Prime fold will introduce it to even more members who might not use it for gaming, but Amazon appears determined not to mess with Twitch's roots in the game streaming community.
In addition to the free monthly channel, which could boost revenue for elite streamers by funneling them more subscribers, Twitch Prime members also get in-game "loot" like skins, characters, and boosts from the most popular games on Twitch.
Still, whether or not Twitch Prime will boost overall Amazon Prime signups will largely depend on the quality of the free games it offers and how steep its discounts on other games are. The inaugural free title is "Streamline," a new game built for Twitch by Proletariat Studios that will be available for Prime members throughout October.
Twitch unveiled the new Prime offering at its TwitchCon convention in San Diego, where it also announced a slew of other product updates. Among them is the ability for iOS and Android viewers to create and share clips from live streams and videos directly within the Twitch app. And in a sign that Twitch may have its sights set on YouTube, any user can now upload videos to Twitch for anyone to watch.