Former exec admits Amazon tried and failed to beat Steam, says the company "needed to build something dramatically better" but "gamers already had the solution" in Valve's store
Remember when Amazon tried to make a Steam competitor? Me neither, to be honest, but the former vice president of Prime Gaming reveals why the company failed.
Amazon has tried to get into the gaming space a few different ways over the years. There's Prime Gaming – which I've only ever used to claim the free games it offers – that functions as a digital storefront and comes with Prime Video if you have a Prime subscription. Say that sentence aloud in the mirror and Jeff Bezos will appear.
More recently, the company has hired developers to make a string of MMOs like New World. But Prime Gaming never managed to beat Steam, something I'm not sure it ever announced it was trying to do.
"We failed multiple times to disrupt the game platform Steam," writes Ethan Evans in a LinkedIn post. "We were at least 250x bigger, and we tried everything. But ultimately, Goliath lost."
It's likely Evans means Amazon is a bigger company than Steam, not that its platform was bigger. I can't imagine any digital library bigger than Steam's, except maybe Itch.io.
"The first way we tried to enter the online-game-store market was through acquisition," Evans explains. "We acquired Reflexive Entertainment (a small PC game store) and tried to scale it. It went nowhere. Then, after buying Twitch, we created our own PC games store. Our assumption was that gamers would naturally buy from us because they were already using Twitch. Wrong."
The truth is, PC gamers love Steam. Even Epic hasn't been able to compete very well. Whenever a game is an Epic exclusive, its eventual Steam launch is treated like the true release of the game.
Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more
"Finally, we built Luna, a game streaming service that let people play without a high-end PC," Evans remembers. "Around the same time, Google tried the same thing with their product Stadia. Neither gained significant traction. The whole time, Steam dominated despite being a relatively small company (compared to
Read more on gamesradar.com
