I did not realize they were trying to compete in the first place.
That’s not how Capitalism works!
/s
The larger company simply needs to create/invent problems that the smaller company cannot solve, and then sell a solution.
And buy them out at some point too. Very important step.
The larger company needs to hinder the smaller company with pointless slapp lawsuits. That way the smaller company will be too busy to innovate anything new.
Amazon tried getting into game production as well and seems to have middling results at best. Having the financial backing is significant, but it doesn’t guarantee success.
So after investing millions in this, this is incredible insight that the VP has gained:
- Talk to Real Customers Before Writing Code
I really recommend reading his LinkedIn post, just to understand how these people think, and how fucking incompetent people at the top raking in millions are. It’s surprisingly honest for a LI post (although that bar is very low), probably because the guy is now retired and doesn’t give a shit anymore.
I honestly never even processed that Prime Gaming was a thing and that it was trying to compete with Steam. I just knew they purchased Twitch and thought they’d probably abandon it into a shitty, old and slow site like they did with IMDB and Goodreads.
Could you link a screenshot of the LinkedIn post? I don’t want to make a LinkedIn account.
As VP of Prime Gaming at Amazon, we failed multiple times to disrupt the game platform Steam. We were at least 250x bigger, and we tried everything. But ultimately, Goliath lost. Here’s why:
The 15+ year long attempt to challenge Steam started before I was VP of Prime Gaming, but we never cracked the code. Not under my leadership or anyone else’s.
The first way we tried to enter the online-game-store market was through acquisition. We acquired Reflexive Entertainment (a small PC game store) and tried to scale it. It went nowhere.
Then, after buying Twitch, we created our own PC games store. Our assumption was that gamers would naturally buy from us because they were already using Twitch. Wrong.
Finally, we built “Luna,” a game streaming service that let people play without a high-end PC. Around the same time, Google tried the same thing with their product “Stadia.” Neither gained significant traction. The whole time, Steam dominated despite being a relatively small company (compared to Amazon and Google).
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.
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.
Reflecting on these mistakes, I realize how crucial it is to deeply understand customers before making big moves. That’s why James Birchler’s guest newsletter caught my attention—his piece is a practical guide on obtaining real customer insights and using them to challenge entrenched assumptions that can hurt product success.
James breaks his advice down into three key steps, illustrated with stories from his time as VP of Engineering at IMVU:
- Talk to Real Customers Before Writing Code
- Test Assumptions, Not Just Features
- Build Measurement Into Your Process
After explaining how he learned these lessons the hard way (getting screamed at by customers and board members), James shares action items you can implement within a week to improve how you understand your customers.
I wish Amazon had followed James’ playbook before trying to take on Steam. But since we didn’t, at least you can.
This is such lukewarm obvious stuff to anyone who’s done any agile project management that it’s mind-boggling they would fail to do it.
But I guess it’s what happens when decision are made by bean counters with absolute authority.
It’s corporate arrogance. “We are so big we can take that market” without understanding what built that market. They think business is numbers but it is about relationships with people.
Feels like every 5 years some major Internet company looks at how many billions video games draws in, established markets with PC and consoles, and how much hype and marketing gets thrown around the space and decides they can do it better.
With zero understanding of what consumers want, expecting to be able to charge extra for content that no one asked for or services like steam offer for free, and usually with such an awful UI and interactions with the consumer you wonder if they see potential customers as anything but cattle to be figuratively slaughtered and try to milk as much currency as they can with overpriced subscription(s) and not-so-micro microtransactions.
Edit: For those that want examples, most recent one comes to mind is Stadia
Every prime gaming offer I took was for games on steam. I really thought they were just promoting twitch with drops and stuff, not actually trying to compete. Haha, the balls.
Valve can make some good calls, but do you guys -really- think enshittification is not coming for it ever? It’s just a matter of time.
Valve is Augustus Caesar. A benevolent dictator that did much to improve the quality of life of his citizens, but still a dictator. They’ve centralized control over the PC gaming sphere and brought tons of legitimate improvements to the hobby. Not they have no legitimate competitors. Epic Games is a mosquito bite, Prime Gaming is nothing, GOG is the closest thing and even they’re miles behind.
It only took a couple of generations to go from Augustus to Nero. I do not anticipate good things once Gaben retires/dies.
When Gabe dies, sure, enshittification will happen. In the meanwhile, enjoy Steam for what it is for now, but prepare with contingencies.
I admit that I still make Steam purchases, but this has started to be in the back of my mind when doing so. It is still another company that sells stuff that the customer ends up not owning. With all that they’ve done for gaming on Linux and doing right by their customers so far, it’s just so hard to doubt them.
Lrrr: Why does the larger company not simply eat the smaller one?
Granted I’m not a gamer, but I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of prime gaming. I’ve heard of steam though.
I’ve checked in on it for the last several months and only picked up like 3 games that sounded interesting. And those only because they were free/included in my prime subscription.
I’m a vivid gamer. I’ve never heard of prime gaming.
My partner streams on twitch, only reason I go on that site (also found out T pain streams a lot of things there and he’s genuinely amazing to watch, I will shill him every time I can). I only found out about prime gaming because I’d get notifications from twitch that I can claim free games from epic and GOG. So I got several big titles that way.
thanks for reminding me to get my free games.
Prime Gaming gives away free games every week or so. It’s one of the perks available to those subscribed to Amazon Prime.
Those games can be on EGS, Amazon’s own launcher (that nobody uses), GOG, or Legacy Games Launcher.
It’s not as if gamers could smell the stench of corporate greed
I love your optimism, but looking at the current trends of preorders, microtransactions, gacha games, … Most gamers don’t care about corporate greed and dive into it head first…
There’s also this thing that happens where, as a whole, we’ll just act capriciously.
I don’t know if it’s true of younger gamers but my generation seems to really choose at random whether we like your product or want you to die in a fire. Any fishy behavior can tip that scale pretty quickly, and if we already recognize a brand, and it’s not one of our arbitrarily Chosen Few, then we might not even give you a chance. Just because we know the name, and that’s already a strike against you.
Easy: Amazon just gotta invent new problems for gamers! And then sell the solution.
This’ll only work if they also buy everyone else who sells the solution, and shut them down.
The only launcher I use the same amount if not more is gog.com. Give me those good old games.
I use gog, but fuck the launcher. Fuck all launchers. An icon on desktop is all I want.
Thankfully it’s easy to get no matter the storefront.
GoG is just the best. They don’t have all the nice things Steam has, like workshop for example, but they compensate for it by actually selling you a game, not just renting it out with drm.
GOG providing installers is absolutely amazing.
Maybe it’s nice on windows, but on other systems, got still relies on steam.
GOG + Lutris
Lutris is just a pain compared to proton. I’m not going to say that its terrible anymore but 90% of the games that I play regularly on steam just work straight out of the box.
Huh, did they make an alternative I don’t know about?
Then there’s me on Gog buying DRM free games that I can download and keep at my leisure.
You’re not the only one.
Whilst I do have a small collection of games in Steam, my collection of games in GoG is about 30x larger, because I prefer buying from GoG when I have the chance.
As the old saying goes “Possession is 9/10 of the Law” - when the installer of a game is in your hands (kept in storage media under your control) such as with games in physical media or offline installers downloaded from GoG, even if they wanted to take it away from you, they would have to take you to Court for it, whilst if the installer of a game is in somebody else’s hands (in Steam’s servers or in GoG’s servers if you only ever use their launcher and don’t download offline installers) they can take it way from you (even what happenned was that they just mistakenly locked you out of your account) and now it’s your problem and you have to throw yourself at their mercy to get what’s supposedly your stuff back and if that fails take them to Court (which for most people costs more than the games are worth).
It’s hilarious that people think “Steam is great” because they don’t often lock people out of their game collections or remove games from people’s collections and when they do and people throw themselves at their mercy to get it reversed they’re generally understanding, when Steam themselves were the ones who created a system where they have all the power and you have none, it’s just that so far they’ve not purposefully abused it and are generally nice when their own mistakes cause problems which one wouldn’t have in a different system - they’re comparativelly better than most other stores because those other stores are so shit (except GoG, IMHO), but they’re still worse than good old physical media when it comes to consumer rights.
Absolutelly, use Steam when it’s worth it for you, just do it with your eyes wide open, aware that you’re chosing to be at their mercy because the system they designed for digital game sales makes sure all customers are at their mercy, so they’re definitelly not your buddies, just (so far) nowhere as abusive as most faceless companies out there.
PS: Back to the post of the OP, amongst all the digital stores with “it’s not really yours” systems, with all the power over gamers than entails, Steam are by far the ones that least abuse it (I think they never did on purpose, though some people have been locked out of their accounts and couldn’t recover access to them) so comparativelly are way above the rest, especially Amazon as demonstrated by their practices when it comes to digital books.
I don’t use the Amazon launcher, but I’m pretty sure the Amazon games are DRM free as well. Not sure if it’s all of them but I know a lot are
Amazon launcher requires an internet connection for games, at least the free ones.
They were competing?
I once playtested their MMO, I believe it was called “New World”. It sucked balls. Didn’t realize they were also trying to get going with game distribution.
It had a somewhat interesting combat system for an MMO, but there were a TON of glaring gameplay and balance issues that essentially guaranteed the game would be dead after a month or two.
People kept finding exploits to fuck the economy so they kept turning off trading which made it difficult to progress. I think my issue was lack of storage and you needed money to get more if I remember right. I got bogged down with inventory management and never touched it again.
It has improved but it feels like someone made LOTR The Two Towers game from the 2000s into a mmo.
To be honest I really do prefer buying games on GOG. One day steam will go shit and we will be stuck with huge game libraries locked there. The day GOG goes dark I’ll still have all the offline installers of everything I bought.
Piracy is our friend. If Steam ever goes to shit, gamers would go back to piracy.
Steam also never took it’s eye off the piracy ball. Offer up a service better than free piracy.
Just pulling from my memory:
- Family Share
- Easy controller support
- Game Casting
- Gameplay recording
- “Invisible Login” for social network
- Torrent from a local area network friend who has the game on their computer
- (list goes on)
Steam Workshop is pretty nice to.
deleted by creator
Because you’re smart and you are archiving everything. Most people don’t even know they can download the installers, they just install Gog Galaxy.
GOG Galaxy has the ability to download offline installers. They’re listed under Extras on the game’s page. It’s arguably even better there than on the website because you can download those .bin files all in a single click.
There’s always someone in the world archiving stuff, and with GOG the installers can be shared freely if they ever close shop, since they don’t have DRM. With Steam that can be a lot harder, depending on the DRM they have
The only reason anyone even knew about Prime Gaming was they pushed it with Twitch.
I saw this posted a couple days ago which pretty succinctly summarizes the current state of the market.
Commented this a year ago, and its just as relevant today.
While this is funny, it is not true: Valve has contributed tremendously to the Linux environment (Mesa above all, and Proton) and based their own console on top of it, making it possible to play almost every game you own, both from their store and from elsewhere.
People at Valve have been cooking every day. Never sitting idle.
This without considering the countless features Steam already sports: friends, achievements, cloud saves, a curated front page.
Yeah really the strategy is chasing resilience and value rather than profit. And the strategy is called reasonable long term planning. Yeah they’re throwing millions into Linux now, because the alternative is being at the mercy of Microsoft who is a competitor with a known monopolistic streak.
Adding features is choosing to stay ahead of any competition now or in the future and to maintain the skills of your devs.
In a parallel universe where epic came out with the Deck instead of Valve, things are probably quite different. But no, Valve announces steam deck and the first thing epic does is drop their already small support for Linux.
Yes, but that’s beside the point. Most people use Steam not because of Linux support or because of BPM.
Valve hasn’t revolutionized their business once Ubisoft, EA, Amazon, CDPR and Epic started to compete with them. They just kept doing what they were doing and eventually saw the bodies passing in the river
Linux support isn’t about competing with them, it’s about competing with xbox
Even though proton is legitimately amazing, I love turning on the filter in steam that shows Linux native games in my library. There are so many of them!
And it’s not just new stuff. Plenty of old favorites have Linux versions too. All the big valve titles of course (including Alyx) and classics like all the infinity engine RPG Enhanced Editions. Being able to hang out with my family, sitting on the couch, but also playing high res Baldur’s Gate with a trackball is some real gaming comfort food.
including Alyx
Huh? Am I missing something? All of Valve’s VR games show up as Windows only, running on proton. I think Deadlock is in the same boat, though maybe they’ll add cross platform support before release.
Huh? Am I missing something?
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/546560/view/3758762298552654077
I think Linux is not formally still not production ready.
Maybe I missed something. Looking on the website on my phone it looks like windows only, so I’m not sure why that stuck in my head. I’ll have to double check on the PC to see what the heck I thought I saw.
Ten years ago when I first tried to play a game on Linux, with no experience, I was completely lost. I spent a few hours trying to get anything to run and eventually gave up.
Last year when I fully abandoned Windows and moved to Linux; I installed Steam, clicked play on a game, and it just ran no questions asked.
Since, I’ve run into a few titles that claim incompatibility; but when you enable the forced use of Proton to make it compatible; it fires right up, no problem.
Now, I could likely find and use the various compatibility tools without involving Steam; but this path has required 0 effort, it just works. I haven’t had to install and experiment with several packages and mess with configuration and pull my hair put after hours of failure or any of that. Just click play.
Its called “not having shareholders to maximise profits for”. Everything turns to shit once they go public.
In the great us downfall of 2026, valve might just be the only big company left standing.
I think it’s called “Do no evil” 🤔
