A former boss of Amazon Games has detailed why the company couldn’t compete with Valve’s Steam platform for PC sales.
Ethan Evans was VP of Prime Gaming at Amazon until September 2020, and in a recent post on LinkedIn he detailed how Amazon “failed multiple times to disrupt the game platform Steam”.
“We were at least 250 times bigger, and we tried everything,” he wrote. “But ultimately, Goliath lost.”
Amazon tried three times to enter the “online-game-store market”, said Evans. The first was by acquiring the small PC games store Reflexive Entertainment and trying to scale it, but this “went nowhere”.
The second, after Amazon bought Twitch, was to create its own PC games store and utilise the Twitch audience for sales. “Our assumption was that gamers would naturally buy from us because they were already using Twitch,” said Evans. “Wrong.”