Everything except making a store people wanted to use? Ethan Evans, who was previously Vice President of Prime Gaming at Amazon, has a short retrospective of trying to take on Steam.
All they gotta do is copy steam features 1:1 and clean up the ui a bit. I’m not married to steam but no one wanna copy all their features let alone improve it.
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.
All they gotta do is copy steam features 1:1 and clean up the ui a bit. I’m not married to steam but no one wanna copy all their features let alone improve it.
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.