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Amazon's previous VP of Prime Gaming said they "tried everything" to disrupt Steam
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this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
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So many of their most beloved features are crazily dev intensive to maintain, and critically they're not static. Amazon never really updates their consumer interfaces, steam is constantly adding new features and reworking their old ones across all their UX. Its just not economically feasible to pop in and replace them if you're a publicly traded company, the shareholders would look at the maintenance costs alone and faint
They can't possibly be dev intensive to maintain, given what we know about how many devs Valve has.
They are VERY expensive and difficult to make, though, particularly if you don't already own the PC platform. It's not that every competitor wouldn't like to match their feature set, it's that Steam has had two decades of a head start and is a whole software company devoted entirely to this, as opposed to trying to simultaneously... you know, make games and stuff.
Steam Multiplayer, VAC and Steam Wallet integration are all extremely dev intensive examples, I'm not sure conflating team size with dev intensity is a great way to look at it since that's not generally how software development works. (Unless you've got client accounts or deep customization, ofc)
Absolutely no argument about the rest, though. Steam built the entire concept of the market it dominates, and now people are trying to build their own little versions without any of the 20 years of novelty in even just defining the medium that valve has done.
Yeah, I don't think that we're saying very different things here, maybe having different intuitions on where and when the effort is applied.
I don't imagine that those examples you provide are particularly unstable or need a ton of changes over time. Like everything on Steam they seem to be built as a module or an API that developers are on the hook for integrating and can be trusted to not change and need additional work from anybody later.
I'm sure there's some back and forth for support and something breaks every now and then, but Valve's approach seems to be to frontload the hell out of polish and then iterate as little as possible once everything is up and running. They really, REALLY don't want an army of devs touching things constantly, they seem to favor finding what works and letting it be.
Hell, even their weird curation systems that were outright bad when they rolled out were like this. They were remarkably reluctant to make fast changes and once they found something that kinda works they haven't touched it much. And that's definitely the most dynamic and evolving part of their entire ecosystem, by far.
If anything a few pieces are looping back around to being legacy garbage. I don't understand how trading cards survived not just their own obvious failure but the entire NFT backlash without being touched at all, and a bunch of their profile stuff is an absolute mess of old, stale UI, at least outside Big Picture.
I'm not even mad about it. It's insane how much of a feature set they've been able to deploy with a relatively small team while also spending a ton of time and effort elsewhere.
Even some of these features are transparent to users but not to devs, for example to say few:
In a sense, this is not so different from what AWS is doing: Basically you offer a service with an API so your customers don't need to create the thing from scratch, but at the same time they become dependent of your exclusive services.