Official Ex-Amazon Gaming VP says they failed to compete with Steam despite spending loads of time and money:

[Sphinx]

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.

"The 15+ year long attempt to challenge Steam started before I was VP of Prime Gaming, but we never cracked the code." He then maps out the timeline. First, an ill-fated attempt at making Reflexive Entertainment's online store a thing in 2009: "It went nowhere." Then, an attempt to make a game store after buying Twitch: "Our assumption was that gamers would naturally buy from us because they were already using Twitch. Wrong." Lastly, "Luna", a cloud gaming app that I literally hadn't heard of until this point. "The whole time, Steam dominated despite being a relatively small company (compared to Amazon and Google)." Thorn, meet side.

It's more the naive fascination Evans has with the idea that Steam is good that baffles me. "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." No doy! Oh, look, I've said it again. While the post is couched in the sort of inspirational LinkedIn corporate speech you might expect, Evans really does just seem to state that Amazon has a bit of an ego about, well, damned near everything:

"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."

Amazon thought it could compete with Steam because it was so much larger than Valve, but Prime Gaming's former VP admits that 'gamers already had the solution to their problems'

"Just because you are big enough to build something doesn’t mean people will use it."

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