Former Amazon Vice President: He tried to challenge Steam but failed completely

2025-02-23 22:22:50|Myriagame |source：minecraft skins

At the heart of the PC gaming field, there is a surprising contradiction: the most open platform in the gaming medium is dominated by a game store.This game store belongs to Valve's company and is called Steam.Despite many challenges in the past two decades since its launch, no one has come close to shaking the Counter-Strike production company's control over the PC gaming market.Amazon, once one of the companies trying to challenge, recently explained his views on why no one can succeed.

“As vice president of Amazon Prime Gaming, we have tried to break the monopoly of the gaming platform Steam many times, but all failed,” Ethan Evans wrote on LinkedIn last week.He retired from his position as vice president of Prime Gaming in 2020 after 15 years at Amazon."We were at least 250 times the size of it, and we tried everything. But in the end, David defeated Goliath."

Evans cited three moves Amazon has taken to seize the market share of PC games from Steam.The first is to acquire a small PC gaming store called Reflexive Entertainment and attempt to scale it up.The second item is to build your own PC game store and use Twitch's popularity to attract players.The last item is launching Amazon’s gaming streaming service Luna.

But none of these moves worked, and the efforts of EA, Ubisoft, Bethesda and other publishers to build their own game store by locking their respective PC games behind annoying proprietary launchers ultimately failed.Now.Even the Epic Game Store launched in 2017 feels more like the launcher of Fortnite, and secondly, Steam's competitor.While the Epic Games Store gives away a lot of free games to users who only log in every year, it seems to be in a standstill (but there are a lot of new features coming soon in 2025).

“The mistake we made was to underestimate what prompted consumers to use Steam,” Evans wrote.“It combines game stores, social networks, game libraries and achievement display cabinets. And it works very well. At Amazon, we thought it was enough to attract customers by scale and popularity, but we underestimated the power of existing users’ habits.. We never verified our core assumptions before we put a big effort into the solution. The fact is that gamers already have solutions to their problems, and they won’t change it just because they have a new platform.”

The retired executive is essentially saying that Amazon originally thought people would choose it because it was Amazon, but if they really wanted to challenge Steam, they needed to really give players a reason to change the platform.“We need to create something significantly better, but we didn’t do it,” he wrote. “And before we start building, we need to test our assumptions about our customers. But we also never really did that.Just because you have enough strength to build something doesn’t mean people will use it.” This is both an endorsement of Valve and a criticism of company decision-making mistakes.

Despite the many reasonable criticisms of Steam, it is still working pretty well.Moreover, from the social networking side to the new Steam promotions each quarter add more cheap games to the player's game library, it also has various ecosystem lock-in effects.In addition, Steam has now basically become the de facto release platform for the biggest unexpected hit games of any year, from "Joker" to "Palu".Aside from all of the above, Steam is one of the main drivers of the attention economy around the game, which is why a cool limited-time exclusive game might land on the Epic Games Store, but you can hardly hear anything about it.

It doesn't feel good to have a company that controls so many aspects in one of the biggest and fastest growing ways people play games, but then again, when other companies try to maintain by having everyone maintain it for launching PC gamesThe experience is also terrible when five different windows come to compete.Perhaps instead of competing for market share and platform dominance, more companies can follow GOG and create a digitally-free copyright management future for PC games.Although it is unlikely, in the moment, this is no more difficult than shaking Steam's status.

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