Non-RPG General News - Amazon vs Valve

The way for Amazon to "beat" Steam is to have the same game library or better as Steam and offer a better customer experience on top, then people will naturally flock to it. Things like discounts, free games, or services that Steam doesn't have (ie, if you buy a game, you get two licenses, meaning you can gift the game to a friend), or other groundbreaking ideas that give a bit of power back to the players would go a long way.

If they just wanna steal part of the pie from Steam by doing the same, people are just gonna stay with the 300+ game library they've built in Steam over a decade, no reason to switch around and mess with more clients and stupid third party gating at no benefit.

They'll probably do what Epic does waste millions poaching exclusive games and a ton of free giveaways. Anyway I have no interest in their MMORPG New World. I detest MMO's.

Buying out exclusivity will only lead to more hate and boycott towards Amazon (as proven by Epic buyouts), because it's forcing people to put up with more DRM, split their game libraries, deal with more client downloads, more third-party shenanigans and so on. I suppose they could throw dollars at developers until they make a platform gamers feel they need to use even if they hate it, but I don't know if they have the resources to do that.

Either way, we'll see I suppose, it's hard to know how the bones will land without having more information on what's going on behind the scenes.

joxer said:

Battle.net tried and failed.
Origin tried and failed.
uplay tried and failed.
Bethstore tried and failed.

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None of those 4 really tried at this, they are stores that only sell games from the publisher in question, also the games are often exclusive to that platform, and the platforms are still running so I don't know how you can say they "failed". Legit Steam competitors are Epic (which you did mention) and GOG.

Game integration with Twitch /Instagram; Gamepass-like subscription models as part of Amazon Prime. Plenty of potential for Amazon to usurp the crown from Steam.

Currently, competition for the crown has relied on primitively trying to replace Steam's features on a 1:1 scale (and failing even at that), but the winner will be the company that brings something new to the table (and hooks people while they're young and don't already have an existing Steam Library).

Bow down to the Bezos Empire.

Drithius said:

Bow down to the Bezos Empire.

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How about no I've seen and read how that empire treats it's workers. It's not a company I'd work for that's sure. As your treated as nothing more then a cog in the machine.

Couchpotato said:

How about no I've seen and read how that empire treats it's workers. It's not a company I'd work for that's sure. As your treated as nothing more then a cog in the machine.

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And yet they still made 21 billion dollars in 2020. Good, bad, it doesn't matter.

Yeah convenience and low prices trump treating workers humanely.

Anyhow I'm guilty as charged as I use Amazon Prime for books and movies.

Arkadia7 said:

Already declaring a boycott just because Amazon has become very "woke" lately, and I doubt I want to play pc games promoting a certain extreme political agenda or bias in them.

Amazon should not be banning books either, another thing that is very disappointing… (it doesn't matter what the books are, its not Amazon's place to be censoring books, even if they are politically incorrect) IMHO

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I’m not a fan of censorship but it is amazons place to decide what content they want to sell or offer.

They are not banning the existence of these books only deciding what they want to carry on their site. Which is their prerogative.

As for Amazon vs steam. I think they’ll be room for both. Overtaking steam will be very difficult for anyone given the head start steam has had and the monetary investment people have in their steam library’s.

I give steam a lot of credit and fully believe that they revived PC gaming if not saved it. PC gaming was not in a good place when steam arrived. Now it’s thriving and I believe steam played a big part in renewing developers trust in the PC as a gaming platform.

sakichop said:

I’m not a fan of censorship but it is amazons place to decide what content they want to sell or offer.

They are not banning the existence of these books only deciding what they want to carry on their site. Which is their prerogative.

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It's easy to agree with this.

Probably you can't buy books about Evolution at the store of a Creationist Youtuber, hm? Their stall, their choice on what they sell. Anyone's free to buy elsewhere.

I don't like censorship either, but what Amazon does is not censorship. The only concern I really have is the lack of proper educative systems that create people without the ability to tell a truth from a scam.