By better systems, I hope you are also including, to name a few: Remote Play, Remote Play Together, Game Streaming, Screenshot capture, Controller API that also works in Desktop, a project to help Linux compatibility with zero effort from the game devs.
I think people just consider Steam as a store, but it has become much more than that.
Never got as far as Remote Play or Game Streaming but would have been trivial for us to do so given the backend infrastructure we had already written.
Game overlays and capture were working fine, and the controller API was designed to support any number of controllers (Steam's support is great but their interfaces are subpar, in our opinion). We were also able to pull from a well known database of controller configurations and device IDs, which really made this a non-issue.
Linux compatibility was fine as far as the client went (all of our code was cross-platform and not webkit frames or the like). The client even ran on Android and iOS.
If you're referring to Steam's Proton, we really didn't want to touch that area for a while. But we had much better systems for searching for new titles, including those that worked well on the system and also matched all of the criteria (tags and whatnot).
Our social system was also designed to support "cross-talk" between different marketplaces (Steam, GoG Universe and Epic) but we never got as far as building out any client functionality - just the initial blackbox proof of concepts.
The store aspect was indeed just a smaller part of it, though it was complicated in its own right.
The project was a great idea and we were executing well on it. Lots of cool new tech was developed for it. But nobody we talked to wanted it - including publishers, users, investors, or even friends. It didn't matter how compatible we made it, the fact that we didn't push you to re-buy games, etc.
We wanted to make an non-shitty experience for gaming and the market simply said "no".
We definitely thought about it, but decided against it. We've re-used a lot of it in some other endeavors we're working on so we don't really want to share the IP.
Amazon already has customers. If their other products are to go by, they'll just give you an account if you have an Amazon account. Probably combined with free games if you have a prime account and you can imagine that it won't take much to compete, at least not for a company like Amazon.
That was my thought. They already give away free games over Prime, if they leverage that they have already given a large number of people stake in their new market place. Plus they own Twitch, I don't believe there is a publisher who isn't interested in the idea of people being able to impulse buy whatever there favorite streamer is playing without even leaving the stream. The strategy is pretty easy actually, give streamers a cut of each sale and encourage them to put up notifications when it happens like they do subs and cheers.
The free games on prime accounts is probably exactly what will happen, and will probably be what needs to happen for it to be any amount of successful.
Look at Epic which offers free games but sees pretty slow growth outside of their flagships. Further, look at Amazon's lumberyard engine, which gathers dust for the most part.
I'm not convinced that their 'weight' will automatically guarantee wide adoption.
> no users, no publishers, neither want to join without the other
> Amazon will definitely get publishers but will users join?
Well, the publishers will be there. If users have a reason to go there over Steam, they will. Amazon will lock in a few exclusives, people will start to come over. Who knows, maybe there will be some way to verifiably move your Steam library over to an Amazon account?
I don't think the bar to compete with Steam is as high as you're suggesting, but even if it is, if anybody was going to start listing companies that could conceivably do it, Amazon would probably be on the list.
> Who knows, maybe there will be some way to verifiably move your Steam library over to an Amazon account?
The library is the #1 reason people stay in Steam. Lots of people just buy games in other places and just add it there.
Amazon could, for example, offer different royalties (say, 10% instead of 30%) for publishers willing to have their old games "moveable" to Amazon's hypothetical new platform and I bet a lot of studios would take the deal. This is not unheard of: it's how Apple does iTunes Match.
> Who knows, maybe there will be some way to verifiably move your Steam library over to an Amazon account?
Given that steam has pretty strict terms with publishers over this, I highly, highly doubt they would do this unless they wanted to dump a huge ocean of money into free license comps for developers to make money from and for users to get free games.
Competing with Steam isn't only just a money/size thing, though of course that helps.
I would imagine they would attempt to secure exclusive rights to a popular title and only distribute it from their new platform. I believe that is what epic did when they launched their store.
The problem was the critical mass issue - no users, no publishers, neither want to join without the other.
Amazon will definitely get publishers but will users join? That's not a given.