Former Prime Gaming President Praises Steam
Former Prime Gaming President Ethan Evans spoke about why their platform couldn't beat Steam.
Prime Gaming continues to expand its subscribers' libraries with free games from different stores every month. But there is no doubt that neither Prime Gaming nor any other game store has been able to overtake Steam in PC game sales.
The expert opinion on the subject came from a recent LinkedIn post by former Prime Gaming president Ethan Evans. Evans, who said that they had been trying to defeat Valve's platform for more than 15 years even before his presidency, explained why Amazon's attempts failed.
Why Prime Gaming Failed
In the post, which you can read in its entirety here, Evans addressed Prime Gaming's shortcomings and what makes Steam's platform unique and victorious. Although they are 250 times larger than Valve's platform, Evans' statements can be summarised as follows:
We bought Reflexive Entertainment (a small PC game store) and tried to scale it. It went nowhere. Then, after we bought Twitch, we set up our own PC game store. We assumed that gamers would buy games from us because they were already using Twitch. We were wrong.
Lastly, we built "Luna", a game streaming service that allows people to play games without a high-end PC. Around the same time, Google tried the same thing with its "Stadia" product. Neither of them gained any significant traction. All the while, Steam has maintained its dominance despite being a relatively small company (compared to Amazon and Google). Our mistake was underestimating the reason consumers use Steam.
According to Evans, their competitors' success came from their underestimated "user habits". Steam was, after all, a store, social network, library, and rewards showcase all in one. The platform worked very well, meeting all the needs of users, and did not look like any other platform.
