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.
