Amazon's previous VP of Prime Gaming said they "tried everything" to disrupt Steam
Amazon's previous VP of Prime Gaming said they "tried everything" to disrupt Steam
Everything except making a store people wanted to use? Ethan Evans, who was previously Vice President of Prime Gaming at Amazon, has a short retrospective of trying to take on Steam.
Valve and I have trust. 20 years of it. They are there, have fair prices, let me play where and when I want, no gotchas, I trust them. Sure tomorrow they could break that trust, but so far they haven't.
Then Amazon, who has continuously ruined my trust. Adding ads to an ad free prime tier, lying about delivery times, getting shittier and cheaper products on their store, and oh yeah, just being an evil company. And they wonder why I never even looked at their store.
And Valve is pushing for Linux support, it might not be a major point for most but for me it is.
It's also a plus for me too.
It's more than just pushing for support. They have made a lot of windows only games just work on Linux.
They've changed it from "need to release and support Linux" to "zero effort other than not actively fuck up the compatibility layer". In user land, it's the same thing. For developers it's a vast difference.
In my two days with linux ive come to really like it, im annoyed at myself for staying with windows for so long and not even trying it. (Cachyos) I prefer everything about gnome and plasma to windows right now. I was just dealing with their garbage ui and random updates for no reason. Its nice having some control.
Have they tried being trustworthy, adding value, and not fucking over customers?
But we tried everything BUT that.
To disrupt stream, you’d need to be better than Steam. Also, what am I gonna do with my existing 1000 games in steam? I DON’T WANT 5 GAME MANAGERS.
All these companies think people want 10 streaming services, 5 steams, 7 spotifys. WE DONT. We just want 1 that does everything we want.
I want five game managers.
Maybe a sixth to manage those.
Competition in the PC market is a good thing. Otherwise it's just another locked down console.
I know that today in most English-speaking countries, competition is worshipped as an all-powerful god that solves every problem. But the reality is that competition is often detrimental to a lot of stakeholders in an industry. Competition optimizes for specific parameters in a downward spiral- that's why every streaming service sucks, and is worse than Netflix was 10 years ago.
What would you hope to get out of a Steam competitor? I will guess that you are talking about price pressure. But Steam does not set the prices- publishers do. That's why the same game is $69.99 whether you get it on Steam, the PlayStation Network, Xbox store, Epic Games Store, or buying physical copies from Amazon, Wal-Mart, Target, or wherever else. In that way you could argue Steam already has tons of effective competition putting pressure on prices, just outside of the specific PC digital storefront space.
So maybe if Valve had more competition, Steam might be forced to reduce their fees to publishers, but there's no reason to believe that cost savings would be passed on to consumers.
If anything, having competition just repeats the fixed costs, or in other words reduces the population of users that fixed costs are spread over, driving up the total and per-unit costs of the whole system.
Now I certainly am not saying anything so dumb as "In GabeN we trust" or "I have faith in Valve to conduct business fairly as a monopoly in the long-term". But the solution is regulation, not competition.
The other notable place monopolies fail is servicing less profitable populations. Valve has so far done the opposite. Epic has outright refused to support Linux, while Valve has made their own free gaming Linux distro, with tons of work put into Proton for free to ensure compatibility. VR is a tiny niche, but Valve still put out one of the best VR systems kn the market. The "handheld" PC market was incredibly niche, but Valve released the Steam Deck and I would guess sold an order of magnitude or two more units than anything before or since in that space. I don't really see any underserved niches asking for a competitor.
One of the only acception I have to the rule of multiple game managers is with emulation. For some reason I cannot stand having something like Emulation Station or anything else but for buying games, Steam is the absolute king with their platform.
I've embraced it, I use playnite to launch all my games. Regardless of which platform they are on
I like the idea of Playnite a lot, but it's one of those cases where FOSS can't figure itself out and I ended up buing the premium version of Launchbox instead specifically to avoid their hot mess of an add-on based modular system.
But hey, they both exist and they both do the thing. As does GOG Galaxy and other alternatives.
Did they try removing DRM and selling you a product instead of an option on a subscription service?
Amazon specifically is known for deleting and/or disabling libraries without justification and without recourse for the victim. It's always a possibility with Steam as well, but I'm not aware of it happening (though I wouldn't be entirely surprised if it has)
RIP Comixology. I can access lower-quality versions of stuff I bought on kindle but the high quality stuff I paid for is gone.
Maybe they should have just made a really great service that people would love?
I mean, he agrees with you:
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.
I can't recommend enough actually reading the stuff people link in social media.
But if I have to actually read the article then what is the headline for?? /s
I like prime gaming, sure I haven't actually bought anything but Amazon has given me a decent gog library and an ok Amazon games one.
No they haven't because not once did I ever consider buying a game from their service. Mainly because I don't know about it.
Fighting Steam as it stands now is like trying to fight an uphill battle on an 80° incline with ice covering the whole hill. It's possible, but I doubt we'll see anyone able to dethrone Steam so long as Valve keeps their principles and morals about not absolutely enshittifying everything to death on their end.
All they gotta do is copy steam features 1:1 and clean up the ui a bit. I'm not married to steam but no one wanna copy all their features let alone improve it.
So many of their most beloved features are crazily dev intensive to maintain, and critically they're not static. Amazon never really updates their consumer interfaces, steam is constantly adding new features and reworking their old ones across all their UX. Its just not economically feasible to pop in and replace them if you're a publicly traded company, the shareholders would look at the maintenance costs alone and faint
They can't possibly be dev intensive to maintain, given what we know about how many devs Valve has.
They are VERY expensive and difficult to make, though, particularly if you don't already own the PC platform. It's not that every competitor wouldn't like to match their feature set, it's that Steam has had two decades of a head start and is a whole software company devoted entirely to this, as opposed to trying to simultaneously... you know, make games and stuff.
Even some of these features are transparent to users but not to devs, for example to say few:
- Multiplayer (big one)
- Microtransactions (eww!)
- Steam Audio (support for specific Audio stuff, not voice)
- Steam cloud (Save games)
- DRM
- Input
- Key management
- Playtest
- Steam Voice
- Valve Anti-Cheat
- Stats and achievements
- Workshop and not as important but relevant to some:
- Virtual Reality support
In a sense, this is not so different from what AWS is doing: Basically you offer a service with an API so your customers don't need to create the thing from scratch, but at the same time they become dependent of your exclusive services.
I've never even heard of prime gaming, if they wanted to disrupt steam they should have tried harder.
Regardless, good, fuck Amazon I'm glad this failed.
Maybe try not being Amazon first?
Maybe it's because they don't have VP of Steam at Valve ?
I forgot they even existed.
I know we all want to clown on this because amazon sucks and we all stan Steam as our corporate overlords.
But there are actually a lot of REALLY good insights in the original linkedin post. Particularly the reality that anything that competes with Steam needs to be
It was a store, a social network, a library, and a trophy case all in one. And it worked well.
Epic is a shitshow and barely competent on the store front. But they took a very smart approach of starting from basics and adding what people want... and people want their video game store to be facebook.
Maybe if amazon had more tightly coupled that to twitch it could have worked but it is clear that coupling any services is a shitshow for them (remember when we could do actual watch parties if people bought stuff on amazon video?).
Was always going to be an uphill battle trying to battle Steam's monopoly and the Stockholmed G*mers.