"We underestimated the needs of users," said the former vice president of Prime Gaming, explaining why Amazon did not defeat Steam
For years, Amazon has attempted to compete with Steam, but unsuccessfully. This was revealed by former Prime Gaming Vice President Ethan Evans on social media.
Evans recalls that Amazon first challenged Steam in 2008 when it acquired the now-defunct Reflexive Entertainment. This was a small company developing its own digital game store. However, success was not achieved.
Six years later, Amazon acquired the streaming service Twitch, soon after which they launched a store on it. According to Evans, the company assumed that since gamers watched streams on Twitch, it would be convenient for them to purchase games there. But this idea also failed—resulting in Amazon disabling the ability to buy games directly on Twitch by the end of 2018.
Another attempt to compete with Steam, Evans writes, was the launch of the cloud gaming service Luna in 2020. Like Google Stadia, it failed to attract a truly large audience. However, unlike Google Stadia, Amazon's service is still operational.
“The mistake was that we underestimated the reasons people use Steam. Steam is a store, a social network, a library, and a trophy showcase all in one. We at Amazon believed that the company's large size and reputation would be sufficient to attract users but underestimated their needs. We never tested our core hypotheses before investing significant amounts. The truth was that gamers already had everything they needed and weren’t going to switch platforms just because a new one appeared. We needed to create something radically better, but we didn’t,” concluded Evans.