Why does every single picture of Gabe look like hedonism bot wrapped in skin?
this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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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...
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Easy: Amazon just gotta invent new problems for gamers! And then sell the solution.
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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.
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Lrrr: Why does the larger company not simply eat the smaller one?
Oh they do, frequently
I saw this posted a couple days ago which pretty succinctly summarizes the current state of the market.
Commented this a year ago, and its just as relevant today.
While this is funny, it is not true: Valve has contributed tremendously to the Linux environment (Mesa above all, and Proton) and based their own console on top of it, making it possible to play almost every game you own, both from their store and from elsewhere.
People at Valve have been cooking every day. Never sitting idle.
This without considering the countless features Steam already sports: friends, achievements, cloud saves, a curated front page.
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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)
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Valve wins by doing nothing... it's a tale as old as time.
Steam's market share is a huge factor in why their competition never succeeds, but it's hardly the only reason. Steam is a whole platform, not just a launcher or storefront. And they're also cognizant that the consumers are not just a revenue source to be milked, but actually long-term customers whose loyalty is important.
It really shouldn't be a surprise that when you enter an established market, you're not going to accomplish shit by providing a lesser service while simultaneously treating the consumer worse.
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The only launcher I use the same amount if not more is gog.com. Give me those good old games.
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