- cross-posted to:
- gaming@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- gaming@lemmy.world
I did not realize they were trying to compete in the first place.
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You can see why Amazon’s efforts suck just by using it. That isn’t to say I defend Steam, or Epic, or GOG, or UPlay, or Origin, or Battle.net, or Microsoft Store because they all suck. They suck for existing as separate things that all do the same thing but each eating 500Mb of space on my computer.
The ideal situation would be a federated platform where everyone shares a single sign on, everyone shares the same update, backup & restore mechanisms, everyone can join the same lobbies and matchmaking. But that’s too sensible.
Or they stop trying to lock people in with exclusive games and instead attempt to actually compete by the quality of the service. I know it will never happen but I can dream.
Why does every single picture of Gabe look like hedonism bot wrapped in skin?
That’s not how Capitalism works!
/s
The larger company simply needs to create/invent problems that the smaller company cannot solve, and then sell a solution.
And buy them out at some point too. Very important step.
The larger company needs to hinder the smaller company with pointless slapp lawsuits. That way the smaller company will be too busy to innovate anything new.
Amazon tried getting into game production as well and seems to have middling results at best. Having the financial backing is significant, but it doesn’t guarantee success.
Honestly I was excited about o3de and still follow it from time to time, but the project feels so industrial versus Godots work
So after investing millions in this, this is incredible insight that the VP has gained:
- Talk to Real Customers Before Writing Code
I really recommend reading his LinkedIn post, just to understand how these people think, and how fucking incompetent people at the top raking in millions are. It’s surprisingly honest for a LI post (although that bar is very low), probably because the guy is now retired and doesn’t give a shit anymore.
I honestly never even processed that Prime Gaming was a thing and that it was trying to compete with Steam. I just knew they purchased Twitch and thought they’d probably abandon it into a shitty, old and slow site like they did with IMDB and Goodreads.
What’s awesome is you will still catch Twitch streamers actively encouraging people to use their free prime gaming sub to their channel or any channel because “fuck Jeff Bezos” lol
Could you link a screenshot of the LinkedIn post? I don’t want to make a LinkedIn account.
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. Here’s why:
The 15+ year long attempt to challenge Steam started before I was VP of Prime Gaming, but we never cracked the code. Not under my leadership or anyone else’s.
The first way we tried to enter the online-game-store market was through acquisition. We acquired Reflexive Entertainment (a small PC game store) and tried to scale it. It went nowhere.
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. Wrong.
Finally, we built “Luna,” a game streaming service that let people play without a high-end PC. Around the same time, Google tried the same thing with their product “Stadia.” Neither gained significant traction. The whole time, Steam dominated despite being a relatively small company (compared to Amazon and Google).
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.
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.
We needed to build something dramatically better, but we failed to do so. And 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 doesn’t mean people will use it.
Reflecting on these mistakes, I realize how crucial it is to deeply understand customers before making big moves. That’s why James Birchler’s guest newsletter caught my attention—his piece is a practical guide on obtaining real customer insights and using them to challenge entrenched assumptions that can hurt product success.
James breaks his advice down into three key steps, illustrated with stories from his time as VP of Engineering at IMVU:
- Talk to Real Customers Before Writing Code
- Test Assumptions, Not Just Features
- Build Measurement Into Your Process
After explaining how he learned these lessons the hard way (getting screamed at by customers and board members), James shares action items you can implement within a week to improve how you understand your customers.
I wish Amazon had followed James’ playbook before trying to take on Steam. But since we didn’t, at least you can.
At Amazon, we assumed that size and visibility would be enough to attract customers
Literally “we’re big so we’ll make money” with no thought on the product actually being offered.
Hilarious.
“But we acquired a successful franchise! All we have to do is attach a handle to it and crank it and the money will come flying out!”
This is such lukewarm obvious stuff to anyone who’s done any agile project management that it’s mind-boggling they would fail to do it.
But I guess it’s what happens when decision are made by bean counters with absolute authority.
It’s corporate arrogance. “We are so big we can take that market” without understanding what built that market. They think business is numbers but it is about relationships with people.
Feels like every 5 years some major Internet company looks at how many billions video games draws in, established markets with PC and consoles, and how much hype and marketing gets thrown around the space and decides they can do it better.
With zero understanding of what consumers want, expecting to be able to charge extra for content that no one asked for or services like steam offer for free, and usually with such an awful UI and interactions with the consumer you wonder if they see potential customers as anything but cattle to be figuratively slaughtered and try to milk as much currency as they can with overpriced subscription(s) and not-so-micro microtransactions.
Edit: For those that want examples, most recent one comes to mind is Stadia
Every prime gaming offer I took was for games on steam. I really thought they were just promoting twitch with drops and stuff, not actually trying to compete. Haha, the balls.
Granted I’m not a gamer, but I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of prime gaming. I’ve heard of steam though.
I’ve checked in on it for the last several months and only picked up like 3 games that sounded interesting. And those only because they were free/included in my prime subscription.
I’m a vivid gamer. I’ve never heard of prime gaming.
My partner streams on twitch, only reason I go on that site (also found out T pain streams a lot of things there and he’s genuinely amazing to watch, I will shill him every time I can). I only found out about prime gaming because I’d get notifications from twitch that I can claim free games from epic and GOG. So I got several big titles that way.
thanks for reminding me to get my free games.
Prime Gaming gives away free games every week or so. It’s one of the perks available to those subscribed to Amazon Prime.
Those games can be on EGS, Amazon’s own launcher (that nobody uses), GOG, or Legacy Games Launcher.
Lrrr: Why does the larger company not simply eat the smaller one?
Oh they do, frequently
It’s not as if gamers could smell the stench of corporate greed
I love your optimism, but looking at the current trends of preorders, microtransactions, gacha games, … Most gamers don’t care about corporate greed and dive into it head first…
There’s also this thing that happens where, as a whole, we’ll just act capriciously.
I don’t know if it’s true of younger gamers but my generation seems to really choose at random whether we like your product or want you to die in a fire. Any fishy behavior can tip that scale pretty quickly, and if we already recognize a brand, and it’s not one of our arbitrarily Chosen Few, then we might not even give you a chance. Just because we know the name, and that’s already a strike against you.
Easy: Amazon just gotta invent new problems for gamers! And then sell the solution.
This’ll only work if they also buy everyone else who sells the solution, and shut them down.
Valve can make some good calls, but do you guys -really- think enshittification is not coming for it ever? It’s just a matter of time.
Valve is Augustus Caesar. A benevolent dictator that did much to improve the quality of life of his citizens, but still a dictator. They’ve centralized control over the PC gaming sphere and brought tons of legitimate improvements to the hobby. Now they have no legitimate competitors. Epic Games is a mosquito bite, Prime Gaming is nothing, GOG is the closest thing and even they’re miles behind.
It only took a couple of generations to go from Augustus to Nero. I do not anticipate good things once Gaben retires/dies.
I admit that I still make Steam purchases, but this has started to be in the back of my mind when doing so. It is still another company that sells stuff that the customer ends up not owning. With all that they’ve done for gaming on Linux and doing right by their customers so far, it’s just so hard to doubt them.
When Gabe dies, sure, enshittification will happen. In the meanwhile, enjoy Steam for what it is for now, but prepare with contingencies.
The only launcher I use the same amount if not more is gog.com. Give me those good old games.
I use gog, but fuck the launcher. Fuck all launchers. An icon on desktop is all I want.
Thankfully it’s easy to get no matter the storefront.
GoG is just the best. They don’t have all the nice things Steam has, like workshop for example, but they compensate for it by actually selling you a game, not just renting it out with drm.
GOG providing installers is absolutely amazing.
Maybe it’s nice on windows, but on other systems, got still relies on steam.
GOG + Lutris
Lutris is just a pain compared to proton. I’m not going to say that its terrible anymore but 90% of the games that I play regularly on steam just work straight out of the box.
They were competing?
I once playtested their MMO, I believe it was called “New World”. It sucked balls. Didn’t realize they were also trying to get going with game distribution.
It had a somewhat interesting combat system for an MMO, but there were a TON of glaring gameplay and balance issues that essentially guaranteed the game would be dead after a month or two.
People kept finding exploits to fuck the economy so they kept turning off trading which made it difficult to progress. I think my issue was lack of storage and you needed money to get more if I remember right. I got bogged down with inventory management and never touched it again.
It has improved but it feels like someone made LOTR The Two Towers game from the 2000s into a mmo.
To be honest I really do prefer buying games on GOG. One day steam will go shit and we will be stuck with huge game libraries locked there. The day GOG goes dark I’ll still have all the offline installers of everything I bought.
Piracy is our friend. If Steam ever goes to shit, gamers would go back to piracy.
Steam also never took it’s eye off the piracy ball. Offer up a service better than free piracy.
Just pulling from my memory:
- Family Share
- Easy controller support
- Game Casting
- Gameplay recording
- “Invisible Login” for social network
- Torrent from a local area network friend who has the game on their computer
- (list goes on)
Steam Workshop is pretty nice to.
deleted by creator
Because you’re smart and you are archiving everything. Most people don’t even know they can download the installers, they just install Gog Galaxy.
GOG Galaxy has the ability to download offline installers. They’re listed under Extras on the game’s page. It’s arguably even better there than on the website because you can download those .bin files all in a single click.
There’s always someone in the world archiving stuff, and with GOG the installers can be shared freely if they ever close shop, since they don’t have DRM. With Steam that can be a lot harder, depending on the DRM they have
Then there’s me on Gog buying DRM free games that I can download and keep at my leisure.
Yep. GOG is good. I’ve been getting a bit more into itch.io as well though. itch is packed with small simple experimental indie stuff. I’ve got no interest in most of it; but there’s a surprising amount of good stuff there too. (At least, it was surprising to me when I started visiting it more frequently.)
You’re not the only one.
Whilst I do have a small collection of games in Steam, my collection of games in GoG is about 30x larger, because I prefer buying from GoG when I have the chance.
As the old saying goes “Possession is 9/10 of the Law” - when the installer of a game is in your hands (kept in storage media under your control) such as with games in physical media or offline installers downloaded from GoG, even if they wanted to take it away from you, they would have to take you to Court for it, whilst if the installer of a game is in somebody else’s hands (in Steam’s servers or in GoG’s servers if you only ever use their launcher and don’t download offline installers) they can take it way from you (even what happenned was that they just mistakenly locked you out of your account) and now it’s your problem and you have to throw yourself at their mercy to get what’s supposedly your stuff back and if that fails take them to Court (which for most people costs more than the games are worth).
It’s hilarious that people think “Steam is great” because they don’t often lock people out of their game collections or remove games from people’s collections and when they do and people throw themselves at their mercy to get it reversed they’re generally understanding, when Steam themselves were the ones who created a system where they have all the power and you have none, it’s just that so far they’ve not purposefully abused it and are generally nice when their own mistakes cause problems which one wouldn’t have in a different system - they’re comparativelly better than most other stores because those other stores are so shit (except GoG, IMHO), but they’re still worse than good old physical media when it comes to consumer rights.
Absolutelly, use Steam when it’s worth it for you, just do it with your eyes wide open, aware that you’re chosing to be at their mercy because the system they designed for digital game sales makes sure all customers are at their mercy, so they’re definitelly not your buddies, just (so far) nowhere as abusive as most faceless companies out there.
PS: Back to the post of the OP, amongst all the digital stores with “it’s not really yours” systems, with all the power over gamers than entails, Steam are by far the ones that least abuse it (I think they never did on purpose, though some people have been locked out of their accounts and couldn’t recover access to them) so comparativelly are way above the rest, especially Amazon as demonstrated by their practices when it comes to digital books.
I don’t use the Amazon launcher, but I’m pretty sure the Amazon games are DRM free as well. Not sure if it’s all of them but I know a lot are
Amazon launcher requires an internet connection for games, at least the free ones.
Steam is a platform that happens to also have a storefront. Other companies are building storefronts and hoping that’s enough.
If you can’t provide fast downloads, cloud saves synced across devices, achievements, mod support, friends lists, and multiplayer support, it’s not a real option. Being cheaper or having some exclusives aren’t attractive. Gog already has the drm free angle to be a legitimate competitor.
Being consistently cheaper would actually be attractive to many people. The thing is, none of these competitors can even muster that. Steam consistently has better sales, more often. And it’s pretty funny seeing Amazon of all things not able to match or beat that. They are known for undercutting the competition, even at their own expense, just to get customers; It’s literally how they got to be as big as they are.
Epic kinda tried that by giving away tons of free games in the Epic Games Store. It didn’t work.
If I want Steam games cheaper, I go buy a Steam key for that game from a separate retailer and activate it on Steam. Save like 50-70% irrespective of Steam sales. It’s remarkable that Steam allows us to even do that in the first place.
Epic also generated a lot of bad blood by scooping up Kickstarter projects and ordering the devs to cancel the Steam releases, releases that had already been paid for by backers. A bunch of potential customers refused to buy from Epic on principle after that.
The timed exclusivity deals are what did it for me
Bringing that bullshit to the PC gaming market guaranteed I’ll never spend a penny on their storefront.
If the carrot they’re leading with is limiting choice, I’m not going to hang around waiting to find out what the stick might be if they get successful
Epic is doing me a favor, I get to keep my money while I play my backlog, then I buy the game on Steam / GOG for cheaper later on.
I’m one of them. For all their trash talk about Steam being a monopoly, Epic Games sure pulled some hypocritical, anticompetitive shit in their attempt to replace one monopoly with an objectively worse, consumer-hostile one.
Epic Games is creating a monopoly in PC gaming - they keep making bad decisions and leaving Steam as the only good option
Look at market shares, Steam is in a monopolistic position, they can turn around and fuck up the whole market whenever they want, and people like you are encouraging it.
You realize that they’re anti DEI over there? I don’t think drag would ever be hired by Valve!
Source?
Yeah that one rubbed me particularly wrong. Valve can be a bit hit and miss sometimes, but they’ve not actively monopolized games from other devs.
Yup, that and pushing “exclusive” bs in general made sure I will never use Epic.
So you want all devs to just play the lottery and hope that some Twitch star picks up their game to make it popular?
He wants games to release on all platforms. Where is the ‘lottery’ rhetoric coming from?
The Epic bros think that businesses shouldn’t have to compete on the market to sell their product, they should just get a big grant from Epic Games for making their game exclusive.
That’s some pretty communist rhetoric coming from a group worshipping a corporation. Epic Games are not your communist revolutionaries.
The exclusivity contract comes with guaranteed funds for the devs. That’s like choosing between a job where you work 100% for commission or one where you’re salaried + bonus, not everyone wants their income to be 100% dependent on sales, especially if those sales will probably be based on the luck of the draw rather than the quality of the product they’re selling.
You can make an awesome game, if no streamer picks it up it will all be for nothing. Last year 18935 games released on Steam, that’s 52 games a day, being successful in that space isn’t just about making a quality product.
Also, you can have the greatest idea for a game but not have the budget to just drop everything and start working on it for the years to come.
I’m still gaining more and more games in my epic library I’ll never use but love wasting Tim Sweeneys money. Lmao
That reminds me, let me see what’s free today.
Edit: nothing good
That reminds me, let me see what’s free today.
Edit: nothing good
I just don’t know how to claim those via web only. I think you have to install the store on Android.
Yeah I only used the web only. I’ll double check to make sure I didn’t miss this game.
I pirate so a free game isn’t worth it for me if it means I have to get their store app or whatever.
I’ve counted 38 games in Epic Games. I’ve played a couple. I’ve spend $0.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they require a game to be downloaded and played to count. I know on PS , if you have already downloaded, after purchase, a refund is less likely, so downloading likely triggers the sale to be complete, with payment to the seller. It could be similar for free games.
Me too. I’m not even a gamer, the only game I’ve played is Civilization. And maybe one day I’ll sell my account for sweet sweet money.
Yep. I have a bunch of Epic’s free games. Never bought a single game from them and probably never will.
The experience on Steam is just better. And Epics lawsuits look less like they’re fighting for the little guy and more that they are envious of the market that other companies have.
of course they are, Epic is a shit company
I am an extremely cheap and patient gamer. This is how I look at both the stores.
If I want free games, I’ll go to Epic.
If I want good deals, I’ll go to Steam.
Why would I go to Epic for good deals when it’ll either have a good deal on Steam OR be free on Epic after a few months or a year?
Maybe if they had done that with brand new games and not just a few good but old games and tons of games nobody has even heard of before. It’s not really even in the same league as just genuinely being cheaper than the competition. It’s a gimmick. Steam also sometimes gives games away for free, while still having tons of deep discounts all year long.
I’m the same. I’ll look on Steam first just because I would prefer to keep all my shit in one place, but if it’s not the cheapest price I’ll get it somewhere else. Although 90% of the time, the cheapest price is just a steam key being sold by a 3rd party (I like Eneba, personally).
The one time Epic was cheaper, was when they gave out Civ6 for free. I bought the two major DLC expansions through Epic instead of buying everything on Steam just because I didn’t have to buy the base game and the DLCs were $10 cheaper anyway.
And their $5 off coupons during numerous sales
It would be so easy for another store front to just take a 20% cut instead of 30% and pass the savings on to the end consumer. That would be a pretty strong start. But nope. They just want to charge the same base price.
I commented elsewhere that I’ve been trying out some classic PC games in their native Linux form lately.
It is so amazing to see my old saves just show up like nothing ever changed. Plus lots of other little things like time played and friend list and all that.
This is something from before 2010, but I distinctly remember not being able to play Borderlands 1 with my friends because the site I bought it from didn’t have a patch yet that Steam did. This was one of the things that sold me on Steam. Prior to that I hated it. It’s nearly two decades ago so it’s hard to really remember why, but it wasn’t always viewed as favorably as now.
This isn’t some dig at Steam, like I said, this was over a decade ago.
There was definitely heavy skepticism at first. Buying online was new when it launched and physical was still king. I remember thinking it was dumb to buy from a website that could disappear instead of good old CDs.
I think the need to be online was what bothered me more, I remember a few times having trouble launching stuff.
Steam is a platform that happens to also have a storefront.
I would like to see government intervention to break up Steam to remedy this
Though arguably Epic is way bigger of a platform since it goes from developer to end user
I’d rather see competitors actually try and be better than steam rather than make steam worse.
How did you get “make steam worse” from that?
Everything else still exists, just not controlled by Valve
…Breaking steam up would make it worse.
How? If any feature is necessary then it will be filled by someone else
You aren’t losing anything
Apart from all the non-profitable features divorced from meaning.
The forums would go in the blink of an eye.
And then each section would try to make itself complete in itself to hoard user time, and at least one would start selling advertising space.
How profitable is running a lemmy instance?
Because each independent section would try to make more money and end up breaking things and adding new shit users don’t want but marketing execs think are good.
Then find a different workshop/forum/launcher to pair with the Steam store
In no world is it worse than what we have now
He literally just said how it’d be worse. Although that’s probably not how it would get worse, splitting up the services of steam would make them inherently worse.
Name an example of a better workshop, I’ve used nexus mods and it’s a complicated mess that requires a subscription to get normal download speeds for content created for free by other people
If steam is a client not a store then whichever steam allows to be built into their client
What exactly would you be breaking up? Steam isn’t a mishmash of companies…
And they have plenty of competition. Just that none of the competition tires hard enough to be compelling.
Because they’re trying to compete on a product level, not a service level. They want your money, but don’t want to have to put forth the effort Valve has to get it.
forums, store, launcher, workshop
The forums company will be where all the money is at, think of the profit!
If your software is profit motivated then it doesn’t need to exist
Not that it would make any difference for the end user because it should all be modular enough for the user to mix and match any of those services with any other services
Does the dadaist approach to arguments usually work for you?
I thought you would have reference Stallman in trying to dismiss me
… How in the hell could you possibly think this would be a good idea?
No don’t break up Steam. Standardize DRM and make digital games licenses ownable/transferable. I could see the EU eventually doing this.
I say this as someone who loves Steam but wants more ownership, in the games I “own”.
Steam is hardly a monopoly.
There are plenty of successfully competing stores. The only real thing Steam has going for it is network effect that every gamer has an account therefore it’s decent for socialising, but even that is being challenged by Discord and a multitude of others.
GamePass is probably the closest we’re seeing to a potential monopoly. The purchase of activation should never have been permitted.
Steam’s best feature is Proton.
As I noted in the comment you’re replying to “Epic is arguably bigger”
So not sure why you felt like arguing about Steam being a monopoly
Then why do you want to see it broken up? Monopoly seemed a pretty reasonable assumption.
Steam seems to value Unix a lot more than Epic does
They offer keys which allows for third party sellers to exist, and there are a handful of legitimate sites that sell keys for steam.
Yeah, but where do you have to go to redeem those keys and then subsequently have to open their program every time you wish to use your purchase (which you don’t own). Steam is very good at promoting itself and locking people into their platform, it’s a constant free advertisement program where they have total control and no competition.
I understand the “Steam is fine” position, but I also wish we weren’t always turning to this ONE supplier for a goods or service because it always hits the hardest when corruption takes over. Would love for these threads to be filled with multiple conversations of all these great different gaming services everyone personally loves for one reason or another, instead of comparing the crappiness between these few huge mega-corporations.
lol
It’s a launcher successful on the most popular OS in the world that they don’t even own that anyone can come in to compete at. And had decades to do so when “PC gaming was dead” so was wide open for anyone that wanted to try to reach potential customers over fixating on the console demographic. What more do want.
It doesn’t even come pre-installed with Windows.
Nobody else has a platform that comes close to competing and most of my games are already on there. From my pov this looks like an awful idea.
Sounds like a free market proponent.
Can I give the classic example of US healthcare where for very minor benefits, the absolute richest can afford to have great healthcare whilst everyone else seems to be crippled (financially) by even minor ailments.
But the industry is worth billions, the line goes ever up, and the shareholders are happy. Just fuck the customer.
