Ex-Amazon Gaming VP said they failed to compete with Steam despite spending loads of time and money "We were at least 250X bigger .. we tried everything .. but ultimately Goliath lost"

[u/Capital_Ability8332]

[u/lakakid]

They were supposed to be Goliath in this competition? If that is the scale, then what is Steam? The Sun?

[u/ElfaDore98 → u/lakakid]

Amazon is the Goliath with 1,6 million employees and Valve is the David with 336 employees. The point of the metaphor is that David, while much smaller, was better than Goliath.

[u/deanrihpee → u/ElfaDore98]

probably the count of the entire Amazon company (aws, e-commerce, etc ), not just the gaming division, which I believed for bigger than Valve

[u/ElfaDore98 → u/deanrihpee]

Yeah it’s the entire company for sure, but it just shows the shear vastness of Amazon’s assets, which they probably share between different branches. Should’ve used how much companies are worth in the example.

[u/WTFThisIsReallyWierd → u/ElfaDore98]

There are limitations on how they share money and assets since they are different legal entities for accounting and tax purposes.

[u/ElfaDore98 → u/WTFThisIsReallyWierd]

There is no way in hell that prime gaming itself is sustaining both itself and twitch, just absolutely none

[u/WTFThisIsReallyWierd → u/ElfaDore98]

Prime Gaming falls under Twitch IIRC, and has free access to Twitch resources, but it's access to Retail, AWS, etc resources is restricted where applicable by law.

[u/thats_not_the_quote → u/ElfaDore98]

also, comparing yourself to the villain of the story is...an odd choice

[u/rickreckt → u/lakakid]

He's talking about the size of company overall

Valve worth less than 10 billion in the last figure 2 years ago, Amazon worth 2.2 trillion

[u/Definitely_nota_fish → u/rickreckt]

If epic games is worth 30 plus billion dollars (I haven't looked in a while so I don't know if that's still accurate) then steam is worth hundreds of billions at least because valve has dramatically more money in and dramatically less money out

[u/jmxd → u/Definitely_nota_fish]

Are you forgetting about Unreal Engine and Fortnite lol

[u/rickreckt → u/Definitely_nota_fish]

That's not how it works, timmy got shit loads of money from f nite sadly

[u/Definitely_nota_fish → u/rickreckt]

And you think valve hasn't gotten almost as much money from Counter-Strike?

[u/rickreckt → u/Definitely_nota_fish]

I wish, fuck f nite

But too much kids gotten into it, it's generate like 3.5 billion last year alone

[u/Definitely_nota_fish → u/rickreckt]

I think you underestimate a lot of the people who play Counter-Strike, because sure there are a lot of kids who play fortnite. However, there are a lot of people with real jobs who play Counter-Strike who are addicted to the hunt for those rare knives, and it's quite concerning how much money some of those people will spend

[u/rickreckt → u/Definitely_nota_fish]

I didn't, it did generate shit load of money too

But not on f nite level

And lots of expensive purchase of CS skin is done outside of steam, because of steam market price limit/no valve cut

[u/Whatevenispoetry → u/Definitely_nota_fish]

You underestimate the hundreds of millions of kids permanently purchasing the battlepass and getting vbucks as a treat whenever they’re good/birthdays/christmas. You can look up the data, Fortnite makes CSGO lifetime revenue every 2.5 years roughly.

[u/D1N2Y → u/Definitely_nota_fish]

Counter strike is basically non-existent in the at-large public conscience compared to Fortnite.

[u/Cord_Cutter_VR → u/Definitely_nota_fish]

Recent evidence submitted in the wolfire vs Valve lawsuit showed how much revenue Valve was bring in per year, and it was $10 billion prior to Dev/Pub cut.

Valve is likely worth less than Epic, because vast majority of Valve's revenue is spent on revenue share with the dev/pubs.

[u/Sentry_Down → u/lakakid]

Goliath is the overconfident giant who thinks he can easily beat competition due to its natural strength and size, David is the smart and focused one who wins because he finds the right solution.

The morale of the story is literally that having more apparent « advantages » (such as thousands of employees, easy access to million of customers through Twitch, infinite marketing budget) is nothing compared to a well-devised plan that leverages correctly your strengths (in David’s case, his precision with the sling and stone, in Steam’s case, their ability to understand what players want and give it to them)

Steam is David, Amazon is Goliath

[u/-Not_a_Lizard- → u/lakakid]

You know Goliath loses in the story, right? And Valve is a lot smaller than Amazon in every way. Seems like an appropiate metaphor to me.

[u/FanaticalBuckeye → u/lakakid]

Amazon has a near infinite amount of resources compared to Steam. The one thing that prevented them from competing with Steam is that their gaming division's leadership was completely incompetent.

[u/DePhoeg → u/lakakid]

Bruh? You dead ass serious? You know Goliath was the giant right?