Amazon apparently thought it was gonna compete with Steam since the Orange Box, but Prime Gaming's former VP admits that 'gamers already had the solution to their problems'

pcgamer.com:

I will never understand, dear reader, why we keep running into this baffling issue of Valve (and PC gaming in general) being underestimated. Starting at its roots, when basically no-one thought it'd work as a distribution platform—and extending into the modern age. Ethan Evans, who was the former Vice President of Prime Gaming at Amazon until 2020, took to LinkedIn recently to share his wisdom as to why the giant never toppled Valve. And, uh, basically, they thought they could just throw money at the problem.

Alright, I'm being glib here—and hindsight is 20/20—but reading through this explanation has me saying 'no doy' like it's my new catchphrase. Evans is at least being a little self-reflective, though: «As VP of Prime Gaming at Amazon, we failed multiple times to disrupt the game platform Steam. We were at least 250x bigger, and we tried everything. But ultimately, Goliath lost.

»The 15+ year long attempt to challenge Steam started before I was VP of Prime Gaming, but we never cracked the code." He then maps out the timeline. First, an ill-fated attempt at making Reflexive Entertainment's online store a thing in 2009: «It went nowhere.» Then, an attempt to make a game store after buying Twitch: «Our assumption was that gamers would naturally buy from us because they were already using Twitch. Wrong.» Lastly, «Luna», a cloud gaming app that I literally hadn't heard of until this point. «The whole time, Steam dominated despite being a relatively small company (compared to Amazon and Google).» Thorn, meet side.

That's not to say the assessment that Valve punches above its weight is inaccurate. In fact, back in 2018, some Valve staff tried to figure out just how efficient they were being despite being relatively small. Turns out, their pound-for-pound efficiency was higher than Apple, Facebook, and basically every tech company. Lower profits overall, sure, but per head, Valve was making some absurd bank.

It's more the naive fascination Evans has with the idea that