Amazon Prime Gaming’s ex-VP shares how the company took on Steam and lost
“Ultimately, Goliath lost.”
🤔 Amazon’s ex-VP of Prime Gaming has shared a candid admission of how the company failed to beat Valve’s Steam
🤷♂️ Ethan Evans explained how despite being 250x bigger and trying everything, they still lost
🤝 Evans said Amazon underestimated Steam, and why consumers use Valve’s platform
🏆 Steam is “a store, a social network, a library, and a trophy case all in one”
Steam has established itself as the de facto home of PC gaming and, despite increasing competition, continues to be the number one place to play. But why is it so successful?
Just ask Amazon’s ex-VP of Prime Gaming Ethan Evans. Evans shared a candid admission of how Amazon failed multiple times to disrupt Steam’s dominance in the PC market on LinkedIn, and it’s a fascinating read.
Evans says Amazon began a 15 year long challenge to topple Steam long before he joined as VP of Prime Gaming, but even though Amazon is at least 250 times bigger than Valve, “ultimately, Goliath lost”.
Evans recalls how Amazon’s first strategy was to enter the online-game-store market by acquiring Reflexive Entertainment (a small PC game store), intending to scale it up into something that could challenge Steam. Unfortunately, it went nowhere.
Amazon then made waves by buying Twitch and created its own PC games store. Ethan says the company assumed that gamers would naturally gravitate towards Amazon’s store because of already using Twitch, but that didn’t happen.
The next attempt by Amazon was to launch its cloud streaming platform, Luna. Like Google Stadia (which is now dead), Luna let people play games without a high-end PC. However, Evans said the service didn’t gain any significant traction. In the meantime, Steam continued to dominate the market.
Evans explains that, ultimately, Amazon underestimated Steam and what drew consumers to Valve’s platform.
“It was a store, a social network, a library, and a trophy case all in one. And it worked well. At Amazon, we assumed that size and visibility would be enough to attract customers, but we underestimated the power of existing user habits.”
Evans admits that gamers already had a solution to their problems, and that they were unlikely to switch to a new platform because Steam ticked all the boxes.
“We needed to build something dramatically better, but we failed to do so. And we needed to validate our assumptions about our customers before starting to build. But we never really did that either.
“Just because you are big enough to build something doesn’t mean people will use it.”
Steam remains the best place to play
With achievements, trading cards, enticing sales, a huge library of titles and an excellent user interface, Steam is rightfully the best place to play PC games. We’ve seen countless competitors spring up over the years, with publishers launching their own stores to take a bigger cut from each sale but eventually come crawling back to Steam.
Epic Games has been Steam’s most persistent rival in recent years and has tried to beat Valve at its own game by offering better rates to developers. But, even though the Epic Games Store has slowly improved, it’s still leagues behind Steam in terms of core features and the community Valve has built. Exclusivity deals have also angered Steam users, as they cannot enjoy games like Alan Wake 2.
With Valve reportedly working on a device that could operate like a console, and the success of its handheld the Steam Deck only growing, Valve continues to cement the loyalty of its millions of users further.
Adam Vjestica is The Shortcut’s Senior Editor. Formerly TechRadar’s Gaming Hardware Editor, Adam has also worked at Nintendo of Europe as a Content Marketing Editor, where he helped launch the Nintendo Switch. Follow him on X @ItsMrProducts.