Amazon tried to beat Steam, but despite being 250 times bigger, it still lostA former Amazon Games executive has explained why, and how, the company's strategy to take on Steam never worked, despite all it tried. Will Nelson Published: Feb 19, 2025 Steam html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"Former VP of Prime Gaming at Amazon Ethan Evans admits that despite the companys size, Goliath lost when it decided to face Steam in the videogames market. Valves storefront has been the most popular place to buy games and communicate with other players for some time now, and Evans has explained just how Amazon attempted to challenge the platform but ultimately failed to do so.Evans worked at Amazon for over 15 years, before leaving the company in 2020. In a new LinkedIn post, they detail how they spent their time as VP of Prime Gaming trying to challenge Steams position in the marketplace, but say We [Amazon] never cracked the code.Over the last decade, Amazon has moved into videogames with several acquisitions and strategies. In 2014 the company bought the video streaming platform Twitch, alongside development studio Double Helix Games, which was later integrated into the companys Game Studios division. Amazon has also struck deals to develop a Tomb Raider game, alongside publishing titles like MMOs Throne and Liberty and Lost Ark. Evans, however, explains that this wasnt enough to go up against Steam.We were at least 250 [times] bigger, and we tried everything. But ultimately, Goliath lost, Evans writes. 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 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, Evans continues. It was a store, a social network, a library, and a trophy case all in one. And it worked well.Evans adds that Amazon assumed that size and visibility would be enough to bring in customers, but says it never validated our core assumptions before investing heavily in solutions.Evans concludes that sheer size is not enough to challenge Valve and Steam. The truth is that gamers already had the solution to their problems, and they werent going to switch platforms just because a new one was available, they say. Just because you are big enough to build something doesnt mean people will use it.If you want more, weve got all the biggest upcoming PC games to watch out for and the best free Steam games to play today.You can also follow us on Google News for daily PC games news, reviews, and guides, or join our community Discord to stay in the know.