The PC gaming landscape presents a perplexing paradox: the most open platform in gaming is dominated by a single storefront. That storefront is Steam, owned by Valve.  Two decades after its launch, despite facing numerous challengers, no one has come close to dethroning the *Counter-Strike* creator's grip on PC gaming.  Amazon was one such challenger, and a retired VP recently offered his perspective on why no one has succeeded.

“As VP of Amazon Prime Gaming, we tried several times to disrupt Valve’s Steam platform, but all of our efforts failed,” Ethan Evans wrote on LinkedIn last week. He retired from the role of VP of Prime Gaming in 2020 after 15 years at Amazon.  “We were at least 250x their size, and we tried everything.  In the end, David beat Goliath.”

Evans outlined three key initiatives Amazon took to wrestle PC market share away from Steam. The first was acquiring a small PC games storefront called Reflexive Entertainment and attempting to scale it. The second was building their own PC games storefront and leveraging the immense popularity of Twitch to attract users.  The last was launching Amazon's game streaming service, Luna.

None of these initiatives worked, and efforts by EA, Ubisoft, Bethesda, and other publishers to carve out their own storefronts by locking their respective PC games behind tedious proprietary launchers ultimately floundered as well. Even the Epic Games Store, which launched in 2017, felt primarily like a launcher for *Fortnite* and secondarily a Steam competitor.  While it gives away a wealth of free games every year to users who simply log in, it seems to have stalled (though there are a ton of new features coming in 2025).

“The mistake we made was underestimating what drove consumers to use Steam,” Evans wrote. “It's part game store, part social network, part game library and showcase of your achievements.  And it just works really well. At Amazon, we assumed that our size and existing customer base were 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 reality is that gamers already had a solution that worked for them, and they weren't going to switch just because a new platform existed.”

The retired executive is essentially saying Amazon thought people would choose it because it was Amazon, but to truly challenge Steam, it needed to give players a genuine reason to switch. “We needed to build something demonstrably better, and we didn't,” he wrote. “And we needed to validate our assumptions about customers before we started to build it. But we never really did that either. Just because you have the muscle to build something, doesn't mean people will use it.”  It's both a credit to Valve and an indictment of corporate decision-making.

Despite all the legitimate criticisms leveled at Steam, it still functions remarkably well. Plus, it has all sorts of ecosystem lock-in effects, from the social networking aspects to each quarterly Steam sale adding more cheap games to a player's library.  Furthermore, Steam is now basically the de facto launch platform for whatever the biggest surprise hit games of any given year are, from *Vampire Survivors* to *Cult of the Lamb*. On top of all of that, Steam is one of the main drivers of the attention economy around gaming, which is why a cool timed exclusive might land on the Epic Games Store, but you'll barely hear a peep about it.

It feels bad to have one company control so much of one of the biggest and fastest-growing ways people play games, but then again, it also felt bad when other companies tried to compete by making everyone maintain five different windows open for launching PC games. Maybe instead of fighting over market share and platform dominance, more companies could follow GOG's lead and create a DRM-free future for PC gaming.  Unlikely, but at this point, it doesn't feel any more improbable than dethroning Steam.