In a surprisingly refreshing and candid post, former Amazon Gaming boss Ethan Evans has tackled why he thinks Amazon failed to compete properly with the biggest storefront on PC.
“We were at least 250 times bigger, and we tried everything,” he wrote. “But ultimately, Goliath lost.” He’s not kidding: compared to Amazon, Vave is tiny, although as a private company Valve’s actual worth can only be estimated.
Evans explains the company’s earliest attempts, starting with Amazon purchasing PC games store Reflexive Entertainment with the aim of simply scaling it up. This “went nowhere” he said.
The second attempt was when Amazon purchased Twitch and created a storefront for it.
“Our assumption was that gamers would naturally buy from us because they were already using Twitch. Wrong,” wrote Evans.
Then came Amazon’s third attempt at conquering the PC market and Steam, this time in the form of Luna, an online game streaming service. Google tried something similiar with Stadia, but as Evans admits, neither service”gained significant traction.” Evans goes on to say that during all of this, “Steam dominated despite being a relatively small company (compared to Amazon and Google).”
So despite al the cash and tech that Amazon could throw at the problem, why couldn’t it crush Steam?
“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.”
Evans 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.”
Steam continues to trundle along, continuing to gain more and more users. In December of 2024, Valve announced that Steam had yet again broken one of its own records by attracted 39 million concurrent users.
Its biggest rival is probably the Epic Games Store which has managed to attract players by the simple strategy of throwing free games at them constantly. The Epic Store does actually seem to be doing quite well for itself and to its credit takes a much smaller cut of a game’s price than Steam does. With that said, it still lacks many of Steam’s beloved features and remains looked down upon by the PC gaming crowd.
Truthfully, though, even if the Epic store were a match for Steam it still wouldn’t be enough. Valve has built an incredibly loyal following through Steam of people who genuinely like Valve as a company. People appreciate that it has remained private and therefore able to focus on what it wants like making random hardware and fun projects like triple-A VR games. That loyalty along with people already owning heaps of games on Steam have helped it remain the biggest PC store around.
All hail Lord Gaben.