Everything except making a store people wanted to use? Ethan Evans, who was previously Vice President of Prime Gaming at Amazon, has a short retrospective of trying to take on Steam.
It's a typical LinkedIn post that doesn't exactly go into a whole lot of detail, but it's still interesting to get just a little behind the scenes from people who worked at companies that thought they could dethrone Steam. In the post Evans notes how "we failed multiple times to disrupt the game platform Steam" despite being "250x bigger" and how they "tried everything".
Evans continued noting "We acquired Reflexive Entertainment (a small PC game store) and tried to scale it. It went nowhere" and then after buying Twitch and trying a store there assuming people would use it because they watch livestreams, they were also wrong. Then it comes to the cloud gaming platform Luna, which also appears to not be going particularly well, noting how along with Stadia from Google that "Neither gained significant traction".
Why the failures? Evans said "The mistake was that we underestimated what made consumers use Steam. It was a store, a social network, a library, and a trophy case all in one. And it worked well".
It's not just Amazon though.
When you think about the Epic Games Store, and how they're trying to compete with constant free game giveaways, they're pretty much coasting on the revenue from the likes of Fortnite, and it shows you truly how difficult it is to move people away from what they like and what they're used to.
In Epic's 2024 Year in Review they might show off some fancy numbers in multiple places with an increase in total spending from users, but they had an 18% cut in third-party PC game spending on the Epic Store. Looking back to 2023, they had a 13% cut in third-party PC game spending, so it's actually getting worse.
If you want to compete in an established market, against a company that's massive and (on the whole) quite well liked, you have to have something better to offer in some way. Just being big doesn't mean you'll be a success.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
wintermute a day ago
Too bad you didn't quote the comment here as well. Unfortunately, your link is locked behind a login screen.
Sorry, since I have a LinkedIn account I had no idea you needed to be logged in to see the comments.
Qifan Xi
Staff Software Engineer at Riot Games
I worked at Amazon in the second era that Ethan describes (after the Twitch acquisition) and was part of the team building the Steam competitor internally. I can attest to the fact that most of the team building Amazon's store were not avid PC gamers themselves; the leadership chain from my team up to Ethan's level certainly were not. For those of us who were (my daily ritual at the time was to go home after work and immediately log on to play CS:GO or Payday 2 until 2AM), working on the project was a frustrating experience because we were told to build something that we could never see ourselves using.
I'm happy to see this post acknowledging Amazon's failure to break into the PC gaming market because it shows a level of introspection and reflection that I appreciate about Amazon company culture.
Caldathras a day ago
Thanks for this. While I was reading through the new comments on GoL today, it occurred to me that it was very likely that no one in the develop team were likely gamers, especially the decision makers. This quote confirms my observation.
Deja vu, really. I had a similar problem with my retail business. The team developing the new point-of-sale software for our chain had absolutely no retail experience and didn't even comprehend what was needed. The software was an absolute mess.
No surprise that Amazon failed in this endeavor.
Now I realize Amazon Prime Gaming never includes any Steam game keys in their weekly drops.
If Amazon Prime Gaming could include Linux native games, that would be in the right direction at a minimum.
At least you can get GoG game key and just download Linux-native game if GoG has them, since the GoG game key is for the game license, not the specific platform it can run on, just the same as Steam.
Epic games can be installed using legendary without requiring wine, then run from heroic with wine.
Direct Amazon-provided games can be installed using nile without requiring wine, then run using wine. I shudder the days when Amazon Game App running in wine would frequently freeze and fail downloads, but no more.
The only games Amazon Prime Gaming provide that cannot be installed is Microsoft Store based ones, since they require Xbox App in MS Windows, and last time I tried, it failed in Linux. I still register the game keys just in case Microsoft decides to allow Linux to install their games in the future. You never know, I can still register the keys from Linux web browser.
Then there is Legacy Games, and its App works quite well under wine, so no complaints there.
I have not seen any other online store-based games that Amazon Prime Gaming gives out, but we'll see. Maybe once they realize they can never beat Steam, they could negotiate with Steam to include Steam games?
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