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.
I don’t think they tried releasing a compelling product.
I think their biggest hurdle was that they are owned by Jeff Bezos
Everything, including:
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giving a shit about the customer and having them permanently own their own games, even DRM-free like GOG?
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Not forcing online connectivity to access the library?
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Not shoving ads and spyware into the rest of the Amazon platform?
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Appealing ethically by paying all employees a living wage?
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Prioritizing innovation in expanding native Linux compatibility?
🤔
Most of the games that Amazon give away are GOG codes lol
GOG codes are the absolute best.
Well wipe my ass backwards and call me biscuit; I have been informed today.
Yeah I found that out too and have been cashing in
Steam doesn’t give customers permanent ownership of their games. Its extremely rare, but game licenses do occasionally get revoked on Steam.
Which means that’s an area where they could’ve tried to set themselves apart from Steam.
Those are terms set by the games publishers, Steam and other platforms pass them on to the customer. The only platform big enough to strongarm publishers to not do that is Steam, but it would definitely make some publishers pull out of Steam completely.
Fuck off Amazon
Apologies, I should have added the sarcasm tag. /gen
Case in point is that Amazon will try everything for profit except not be cunts
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Every single Amazon product is a half-arsed mess off things that barely function. They’re basically just a delivery company that charges a percentage of the package value now.
They also charge storage fees to keep your products on their shelf in the warehouse.
Something like 70% of their net income comes from AWS that pretty much runs a huge portion of the internet.
No they didn’t.
I never saw a simple program with a clean store front and no bullshit.
I didn’t even notice they tried to take on Steam.
Ethan Evans desperately trying to keep his job as VP of Prime Gaming:
I mean, they didn’t try making a good game store.
Steam? Set your sights lower. Maybe try to beat GOG or the EA launcher.
They’d have to do something really crazy to have me pick Amazon over GOG!
It’s basically like G-Force now for a selection of GOG and epic games
They barely tried at all
Nobody is going to overtake steam without being better. Corporate suits are also too out of touch to even come close
No publicly traded company can compete with a well run private company. Infinitely growing profits breaks everything. Never take a company public if you can help it. It may even be preferable to shutter it if that is the only other option. Having stupid amounts of money is cool and all, but it does nothing useful. Money is only a tool if you actually use it… a golden hammer sitting on a shelf does no one any good.
Yeah even apple is talking about potentially introducing ads into maps when their whole positioning of premium price has meant premium product and experience.
But the pressure of continual stock increases means company has to keep chasing exponential growth as opposed to being content with sustainable growth.
Also a company that isn’t primarily a gaming company isn’t going to overtake them.
Cloud streaming is not a replacement for steam.
Tried everything except building a nice service that doesn’t get in the way and that works, without enshittification and monetisation everywhere.
Beat the competition, then enshittify yourself while your customer base sticks with you is the strategy used in all Amazon products. Amazon is the last storefront I would want to sell games in the scale of Steam.
They all tried. They all failed.
Same with video streaming platforms vs Netflix.
Netflix is utter crap. Way over the other side of the enshittification fence. They only subsist due to user capture. They were first thus everyone seems to have an account. More akin to Facebook to social networks than steam to online videogame stores.
Yes but none of the others have usurped it. They all were on Netflix, left to make their own platforms and are finding out the hard way that running a video platform is not cheap nor easy. Some shuttered and returned to Netflix.
Again, not comparable. Prime video, Disney+ and Max are all similar in subscribers size to Netflix. Steam is ten times larger than GOG in number of active users and twice as large as Epic.
Yes they are now but it took a very long time to get there. And prime gets subscribers by default so to, well, prime 🤣. Netflix still has over 300m.
I’m not even a sub, I cancelled a while back and only have Disney.
What I was trying to say is, like steam, there was originally one platform in Netflix. Everyone was on it and it was a good time. Then, like steam, a lot of publishers left steam/Netflix and took their content in favour of their own platforms. And then years later due to costs and lower numbers than needed, ended up making their content not exclusive.
Again, doesn’t sound similar to me. There are plenty of exclusives both on the streaming and the videogames world. But the history on steam doesn’t follow Netflix’s history at all.
I think the problem is equating a public trade, stockholders driven service that is entirely in the gutter of service quality and shitty corporate behavior. With a private company that has a mostly solid ethic track record (with few exceptions) that offers unrivaled added value. Netflix already lost the streaming wars. Max exclusives will never go to Netflix, Disney would rather feed children to the pigs than share their IPs. While devs already negotiate time windows to end the exclusivity deals with Epic right out of the gate. Publishers will foam at the mouth about exclusivity just to release steam versions two years later. It’s a massively different situation to Netflix.
Prime is better than Netflix imo.
As is Disney Plus.
Prime was tragic for years with terrible interface and content. It’s only recently in the last year or so that it got to a decent level. Disneys content is very good these days, but their interface could still do with some work.
I’m only a subscriber of Disney as their content matches my interests. I despise Amazon so only get a free trial or pay for a month when something like Reacher is on. Netflix own content no longer interests me especially after cancelling half the things I like.
I feel like everyone is missing the point here.
