Former Prime Gaming VP Reflects On Amazon's Failure To Overtake Steam

Nearly two decades ago, Valve expanded Steam to include third-party titles on its way to becoming the dominant marketplace for PC games. That attracted the attention of Amazon, which had previously used its online reach to become the No. 1 book seller. But when Amazon tried to use Prime Gaming to overtake Steam, it came up far short of that goal. Now, former Prime Gaming VP Ethan Evans has offered his perspective about why Amazon couldn't dislodge Steam from its perch.

Via PC Gamer, Evans shared a lengthy post on his LinkedIn account about Amazon's multiple attempts to supplant Steam over the years. He noted that Amazon's attempt to scale up its smaller online PC game store--Reflexive Entertainment--went nowhere; and buying Twitch couldn't convince players to make Prime Gaming their preferred PC games marketplace. Even Prime Gaming's game-streaming service, Luna, didn't make much headway despite allowing users to play games without a high-end PC. In the end, Evans concluded that Amazon underestimated Valve and didn't understand why players gravitated to Steam.

"[Steam] was a store, a social network, a library, and a trophy case all in one. And it worked well," wrote Evans. "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."

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