Former Amazon Games VP Reveals Why “Goliath” Lost To Steam

Summary

• Amazon failed to disrupt Steam despite acquisitions and a new game streaming service.
• Underestimating user habits and existing solutions led to Amazon’s gaming failures.
• Steam’s success as a store, social network, library, and trophy case made it unbeatable.

Amazon's push into gaming has been largely unsuccessful. The platform certainly gives away a bunch of great games for free each month, but its efforts with game streaming service Luna were mostly in vain, and its purchase of Twitch hasn't moved the dial either.

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Only two games were worse.

Now, in a new post on LinkedIn, former VP of Prime Gaming at Amazon, Ethan Evans, has shared what the company's overall goal was and why it ultimately failed.

"We Underestimated What Made Consumers Use Steam"

Evans shared that Amazon's ultimate plan was to "disrupt the game platform Steam," adding that his company was at least 250 times bigger and it "tried everything."

The former VP revealed that Amazon had a three-pronged approach to conquering the online video game marketplace: Acquiring Reflexive Entertainment's game store and scaling it up, purchasing Twitch and creating another storefront, and developing Luna, Amazon's game streaming service and Google Stadia competitor. Evans shares that despite this, "The whole time, Steam dominated despite being a relatively small company."

We underestimated what made consumers use Steam.

Ultimately, Evans thinks that "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.

"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."

It's a candid admission but one that comes as no surprise. Steam is, and always has been, the premium online video game storefront, with Epic Games Store and GOG filling in any niche gaps. Amazon was sipping from a poisoned chalice if it thought it could ever take those down.

Steam