Executives have consistently shown themselves to be wildly out of touch when it comes to understanding consumers in the video game market, and a misguided analysis of Amazon Luna’s failure to compete with Xbox Game Pass, along with the Twitch gaming store’s failure to topple Steam, provides a perfect illustration of this.
At the time Luna launched, Game Pass was an outstanding value, with hundreds of quality games at a low price. Steam’s available games are in the tens of thousands, and the idea that fans would prefer to buy from a store attached to Twitch is fundamentally demeaning and condescending.
There are valid reasons to select Good Old Games as one’s digital storefront of choice, since GOG’s DRM-free policies preserve games, and nothing beats Steam in the sheer number of options available. Amazon purchased Twitch, then assumed fans who used Twitch would buy games there over alternative storefronts, which is a baffling leap in logic.
Even in the company's post-mortem analysis, while executives may recognize a failure, they rarely realize why a service, or a storefront, fails.
Steam provided more options, and Game Pass provided more value. These are simple truths that consumers recognize, but executives remain blind to, seeking alternative explanations.