Former Vice President of Amazon Recounts How The Company Lost to Steam

Ethan Evans, the former Vice President of Prime Gaming in Amazon, said that the reason why they lost against Steam is because they didn’t understand their target audience. He also mentions that Amazon needed to build something dramatically better, but wasn’t able to.

Evans wrote a LinkedIn post about Amazon’s failure in challenging Steam. According to him, Amazon wanted to create a storefront just like Steam and their first move was to acquire Reflexive Entertainment and scale it. This resulted in failure.

Then, after the purchase of Twitch, Amazon wanted to rekindle the PC Games Store project, however, they were under the false pretense that gamers will switch over to their store because they were already using Twitch. Ethan realized later that gamers aren’t looking for solutions as Steam was already the solution to their problems.

According to him, they needed to build something much better than Steam to be able to succeed, but they failed in doing that. Not only that, they also failed in making sure whether the store they wanted to make was something that gamers really needed.

Qifan Xi, a software engineer at Riot Games, commented on the post sharing his experience in Amazon. He said that he was a part of the team that tried to create the Amazon store for games, however, most of the team involved in creating it are not gamers themselves. According to him, it was a frustrating experience as they’re essentially building something that they could never see themselves using.

Evans left Amazon in September 2020. He was responsible for Amazon’s Prime Gaming and was also the person who handled Twitch’s and Amazon’s integration in 2015. According to his LinkedIn profile, the latter was “possibly the best job ever”.