Ex-Amazon Gaming Exec Explains Why Steam Still Dominates

A shocking contradiction sits on the coronary heart of PC gaming: the medium’s most open platform is nonetheless dominated by a single storefront. That storefront belongs to Valve, it’s referred to as Steam, and regardless of loads of challenges within the 20 years because it launched, nobody has but come near unseating the Counter-Strike maker’s grip on the PC gaming market. Amazon was one of many corporations that attempted, and one in every of its retired VPs not too long ago defined his tackle why no person has succeeded.

“As VP of Prime Gaming at Amazon, we failed a number of instances to disrupt the sport platform Steam,” Ethan Evans, who retired as VP of Prime Gaming in 2020 after a 15-year stint on the firm, wrote on LinkedIn last week. “We have been no less than 250x greater, and we tried every thing. However in the end, Goliath misplaced.”

Evans listed three initiatives Amazon pursued to try to steal PC gaming market share away from Steam. The primary was buying a small PC recreation retailer referred to as Reflexive Leisure and making an attempt to scale it. The second was constructing out its personal PC recreation retailer and utilizing Twitch’s recognition to drive gamers towards it. Lastly, there was Luna, Amazon’s recreation streaming service.

None of those made a dent, and efforts by EA, Ubisoft, Bethesda and different publishers to construct shops by locking their respective PC video games behind annoying proprietary launchers ultimately failed as properly. Even the Epic Video games Retailer, launched again in 2017, remains to be a Fortnite launcher first and a Steam rival second. Regardless of making a gift of tons of free video games yearly to individuals only for logging on, Epic’s storefront looks like its stalled out (though lots of new features are on the way in 2025).

“The error was that we underestimated what made customers use Steam,” Evans wrote. “It was a retailer, a social community, a library, and a trophy case multi functional. And it labored properly. At Amazon, we assumed that dimension and visibility could be sufficient to draw prospects, however we underestimated the ability of present consumer habits. We by no means validated our core assumptions earlier than investing closely in options. The reality is that players already had the answer to their issues, and so they weren’t going to change platforms simply because a brand new one was obtainable.”

What the retired govt is actually saying is that Amazon thought individuals would present up just because it was Amazon, when if it actually needed to take Steam on, it wanted to really give gamers a purpose to change. “We wanted to construct one thing dramatically higher, however we failed to take action,” he wrote. “And we wanted to validate our assumptions about our prospects earlier than beginning to construct. However we by no means actually did that both. Simply since you are large enough to construct one thing doesn’t imply individuals will use it.” It’s a testomony to Valve as a lot because it’s an indictment of C-suite mind rot.

For all the legitimate criticism of Steam—the dearth of moderation, horrible discovery instruments, Nazi-ridden boards, and ageing infrastructure—it nonetheless works fairly rattling properly. Then you have got all the ecosystem lock-in, from the social community side to new Steam gross sales including extra low-cost video games to gamers’ libraries each season. Plus it’s now principally the de facto launching floor for the largest sudden hits of any given yr, from Balatro to Palworld. Along with every thing else, Steam is among the foremost drivers of the eye financial system round gaming, which is why a cool timed unique may hit the Epic Video games Retailer and also you by no means hear a peep about it.

It doesn’t really feel nice that one firm controls a lot about one of many largest and fastest-growing methods individuals play video games, however then once more it additionally sucked when corporations tried to compete by making everybody keep 5 totally different home windows for booting up PC video games. Possibly as an alternative of competing for market share and platform dominance, extra corporations may comply with GOG in creating a DRM-free future for PC gaming. Unlikely, however no extra so than unseating Steam at this level.

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