I remember a while back when I had to deal with Amazon customer service.

I had my Amazon account deleted shortly after that "pleasant" experience. Don't regret that at all, usually I find whatever Amazon is selling at cheaper prices elsewhere.

edit: what actually made me extra annoyed was the hoops I had to go through just to delete my account with them. It was a process that involved finding out *how* to delete the account by googling all over the internet because that information is not readily available on the Amazon website, clicking through the most obscure parts of their dumb website and finally needed to confirm this with an actual service representative, confirming again through email and finally I was free.

Scumbags in my book.

Ah yes, just like the Kindle brought considerable competition to the ye olde bookstores.

Which is why I believe GOG would be safe from Amazon as it is from Steam. By carving its own niche, being DRM free, GOG offers what the others won't. Which makes it all the more important for GOG to avoid using Galaxy to ease buyers into Steam's model. Stay DRM free!

Im a Prime member (over 75 items ordered last year).....LOL. I probably could escalate my request to a supervisor, but its not worth it. I bought it with a coupon for $5, so no big loss. If it was a newer AAA title, then yes, i would escalate. I have Darks Souls and Batman Origins on Steam when they were still under Windows Live and when Windows Live went under, Steam automatically upgraded my games to their drm version for free and without me having to ask anything. Thats the way it should be. Steam knows what they are doing and Amazon has no clue when it comes to digital game distribution. Amazon will not be able to compete with Steam, not even close.

Also, their download program and servers are just horrible, very very bad. Downloads time out frequently and doesn't auto restart. You have to restart the download yourself and it takes forever to download and these games were under 10Gb. I cant imagine trying to download from them with the newer AAA games that are 50+ Gb.

My sister applied for a management job there. She saw how she'd be expected to treat people who she managed and was disgusted with the way they treated their employees.

I always remember the founder buying a house with a garage in order to pretend he started his business out of a garage to market it as a 'story'.
TBF Amazon don't need to be anywhere near as good as Steam to sell plenty of digital software. Gamers will goto Steam, but laymen will goto Amazon.

No please no we dont need more distributors. I just got battlefield 4 out of greenman mystery games. I love the battlefield series and will be downloading it but I have to use origins now on top of already having a GOG and Steam. Just keep amazon as a place for the occasional sale. In terms of gaming for me amazon is best for PC hardware, occasional cheap steam keys, and oddball tools for repairing old gaming console stuff.

Also amazon could never stop GOG imo. I like desktop clients to launch games and GOG is a nice companion to Steam, if Amazon launched a client it would be bloated with ads.

But can Amazon convince other developers to develop for yet another framework, or will it be like the Uplay store, with only a few select games using Amazonworks (working title), while the rest will be nothing more than Steam keys?

Thanks for the detailed reply! Your experience still kinda sucks no matter if it's a 5$ or 60$ game and well also perfectly shows the risks of customers in the digital game business

*Chuckle* Gotta love the "integrity" of gaming journalism nowadays.

Let's look at this "revenue" figure - it was derived from Steam Spy, a service that wildly guesses how many games are sold based on publicly available "currently playing" figures, estimating that Steam was responsible for 15% of global PC game sales, and extrapolates that from some random and undefined estimate that the PC gaming market was worth $23 billion (all available data conflates PC "core title" data with MMOs, making a comparison pointless as the East Asian PC MMO market is just ridiculously large).

That 15% figure was picked out of thin air, and the reliability of Steam Spy is dubious to put it mildly - the assumption that every one of those sales is at full price is ridiculous to say the least, and many of those copies will have been procured from external sources such as Humble, GMG or Amazon (or, dare I say, G2A).

Gotta love those clickbait headlines.

That's not how SteamSpy works. It samples user profiles for owned games. It's not a wild guess, but a reliable estimate.

They aggregated price at the time of sale, not full price.

Amazon restricts to US for no good reason all the time, including digital goods. Kindle took forever to get here, just last month they expanded Amazon Prime to include *their own* (and only their own) video content (so there are no studio licensing problems). We still can't get Alexa here. You can't buy digital music from them (though that is partially understandable, given the way CRTC acts for Canadian content)...

It's weird. A smaller population like Canada would seemingly be a great way to beta test products, you'd think.

I don't pay much attention to amazon.com. Usually when on US websites I'm used to seeing North America only when it's not available elsewhere. No idea if amazon is different in that way.
As far as beta testing goes, I imagine the lack of descent consumer laws in the US makes beta testing there more convenient.

Problem no. 1 - sampling user profiles for owned games requires those games to have their profiles set to public. Because profiles are private by default, this is hardly a reliable method of sampling.

Problem no. 2 - it is impossible on the basis of publicly available data to determine when the sale was made.

This is actually the best thing which might come out of it; developers going back to developing their own stuff so they are not excluded by either one of the big guys; which at that point would also be less painful to release on gog too.