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Remember when Amazon tried to make aSteamcompetitor?
Amazon has tried to get into the gaming space a few different ways over the years.
Say that sentence aloud in the mirror and Jeff Bezos will appear.
More recently, the company has hired developers to make a string of MMOs likeNew World.
“We failed multiple times to disrupt the game platform Steam,” writes Ethan Evans in aLinkedIn post.
“We were at least 250x bigger, and we tried everything.
But ultimately, Goliath lost.”
It’s likely Evans means Amazon is a bigger company than Steam, not that its platform was bigger.
I can’t imagine any digital library bigger than Steam’s, except maybe Itch.io.
“The first way we tried to enter the online-game-store market was through acquisition,” Evans explains.
“We acquired Reflexive Entertainment (a small PC game store) and tried to scale it.
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.
The truth is, PC gamers love Steam.
Even Epic hasn’t been able to compete very well.
“Around the same time,Googletried the same thing with their product Stadia.
Neither gained significant traction.
There’s no need to buy a new platform like Luna or Stadia.
“The mistake was that we underestimated what made consumers use Steam,” Evans admits.
And it worked well.
We never validated our core assumptions before investing heavily in solutions.
This is the same reason I don’t see myself ever fully switching to PC or Xbox.
“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 doesnt mean people will use it.”
