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.
Ethan Evans desperately trying to keep his job as VP of Prime Gaming:
Nobody is going to overtake steam without being better. Corporate suits are also too out of touch to even come close
Also a company that isn’t primarily a gaming company isn’t going to overtake them.
No book store could ever take on a retail store…
Nobody is going to overtake Steam even if they’re better. People don’t want to have multiple libraries to deal with so you see them brag about paying for games to have them on Steam even though the game has been free on other platforms… Sometimes they even have claimed them and will still spend money to have them on Steam.
Steam will stay great so long as they stay a private company. It’s the enshitification of going public and appeasing boardmembers and shareholders that ruin companies like Valve. I hope GabeN chooses a great successor when he decides to step down. Hoping for another 27 years of awesome.
You realize that the cut they’re taking ends up being used to pay for a yacht collection, right? They don’t need board members and shareholders to enrich the few at the expense of the many and to take anti diversity decisions…
There’s nothing great about Valve at this point, they disrupted the status quo back in the day, came up on top and take advantage of their position, just like any other company, private or public, does in their position.
They disrupted the status quo back in 2003 (2001?), then in 2009 they were doing Linux ports, then in ~2015 they were doing HTPC stuff (and also funding Linux graphic driver dev the entire time, Linux gaming in its current state would not exist without Valve), there was their Steam Machine experiment somewhere in there (it flopped but that doesn’t make it cost any less), then they were doing Steam Deck stuff. They’re still paying Linux graphic devs BTW.
What position are they taking advantage of? If they ask for a smaller cut than 30 percent they get botched at for being anti competitive and being too cheap to try and compete against. They ask for more than 30% and they’re price gouging. Sure, everyone who works there is happy and sleeps in piles of money, but they can’t do anything about it without turning into more of a monopoly. As it stands they at least blow money on potentially cool things in R&D like the steam controller, steam box, and Steam Deck.
What do you actually want Gabe to do? He’s already far and wide the industry leader in employee compensation, and he can’t take a smaller cut without becoming a monopoly. Yeah, he could donate loads of money to charity, but his giant stack of cash also keeps his private company lush with funds to continue paying his employees if anything dire does happen, instead of doing like everyone else and laying off people.
You’re defending the owner of a yacht collection and saying his money is used to keep his business lush… Get real.
And you didn’t answer my question.
Because such a ridiculous take doesn’t warrant a response.
No no, you don’t understand!
He’s one of the good billionaires!
(/s for some of you, and for others perhaps you should reconsider why you feel the need to defend a billionaire, regardless of your opinion on video game platforms)
You realize that the cut they’re taking ends up being used to pay for a yacht collection, right?
God forbid a man spend his money however he wants. Get that commie bullshit out of here.
Money changes hands consensually and Gaben/Valve have more than earned mine. Treating your customers like they are your priority in running a service will do that.
There’s nothing great about Valve at this point
Except their massive contributions to the Open Source/Linux ecosystems with Vulkan and Proton, SteamVR being the only properly supported agnostic VR library, and them basically being the one thing between us and Microsoft becoming a walled garden when it comes to gaming, and more recently the Steam Deck?
If you gotta be a hater, at least be correct.
Wow, continue defending billionaires like that, I’m sure their wealth will trickle all the way down to you any day now.
Implying I care LMAO
I’m more than economically comfortable, by no means a billionaire but I’m not hurting like, at all. I own my own home, I am set to inherit like 2 more houses, I make good money at a stable job, I have time for my hobbies and a family I love.
I want for nothing that I can’t have, with some patience.
Gaben having a Yacht collection makes no difference to me, Steam existing and Valve doing what they do does, so I am happy to see them thrive.
Not everyone is an envious crab in a bucket who feels the constant need to compare themselves to others and ensure nobody is more well off than they are.
What a sad life you must lead that you get this angry over something that doesn’t affect you in the least, or did Gabe outbid you on your dream yacht?
Me me me me me
My dude, the world isn’t only about you. You’re much closer to ending up on the street than you are from any billionaire that exists.
Now off to the block list you go, people like you don’t deserve anyone’s attention.
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.
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.
I didn’t even notice they tried to take on Steam.
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
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
GOG codes are the absolute best.
I just installed all the free games I got from Amazon before deleting my account and they’re all DRM free…
Fuck off Amazon
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.
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They all tried. They all failed.
Same with video streaming platforms vs Netflix.
Prime is better than Netflix imo.
As is Disney Plus.
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.
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
No they didn’t.
I never saw a simple program with a clean store front and no bullshit.
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.
I don’t think they tried releasing a compelling product.
I think their biggest hurdle was that they are owned by Jeff Bezos
Their Luna product seems to be different to Steam. It’s a streaming platform like Playstation Now or the Google Stadia one that got shut down.
The other games that they’ve got on there primarily seem to be DRM-free GOG codes, mixed with some for the Epic store. Maybe they meant they were taking on Steam by boosting their competitors?
I mean, they didn’t try making a good game store.
They barely tried at all
