Former Amazon Games boss explains why it couldn’t compete with Valve’s Steam: “Goliath lost”
A former boss of Amazon Games has detailed why the company couldn’t compete with Valve’s Steam platform for PC sales.
Ethan Evans was VP of Prime Gaming at Amazon until September 2020, and in a recent post on LinkedIn he detailed how Amazon “failed multiple times to disrupt the game platform Steam”.
“We were at least 250 times bigger, and we tried everything,” he wrote. “But ultimately, Goliath lost.”
Amazon tried three times to enter the “online-game-store market”, said Evans. The first was by acquiring the small PC games store Reflexive Entertainment and trying to scale it, but this “went nowhere”.
The second, after Amazon bought Twitch, was to create its own PC games store and utilise the Twitch audience for sales. “Our assumption was that gamers would naturally buy from us because they were already using Twitch,” said Evans. “Wrong.”
The third effort from Amazon was its Luna streaming service, which competed with Google’s own ill-fated Stadia – that shut down in January 2023. Luna remains live, but Evans admitted neither Amazon nor Google’s efforts “gained significant traction”. “The whole time, Steam dominated despite being a relatively small company (compared to Amazon and Google),” he said.
So what went wrong? “The mistake was that we underestimated what made consumers use Steam,” said Evans. “It was a store, a social network, a library, and a trophy case all in one. And it worked well.”
He continued: “At Amazon, we assumed that size and visibility would be enough to attract customers, but we underestimated the power of existing user habits. We never validated our core assumptions before investing heavily in solutions. The truth is that gamers already had the solution to their problems, and they weren’t going to switch platforms just because a new one was available.
“We needed to build something dramatically better, but we failed to do so. And we needed to validate our assumptions about our customers before starting to build. But we never really did that either.
“Just because you are big enough to build something doesn’t mean people will use it.”
Amazon still has its Prime Gaming subscription, which this month includes BioShock 2 Remastered and Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
And after publishing multiple MMORPGs, Amazon Games’ next release will be King of Meat from ex-Lionhead and Media Molecule developers.
Steam, meanwhile, has just seen its concurrent player numbers peak once again this month, hitting 39.92 million online users.
Steam’s other big competitor, the Epic Games Store, also now has more players than ever.
