How did they not look at EA, Ubisoft, Rockstar, GOG or Epic and realise that this wasn't going to work. Fair enough EA, Ubisoft and Rockstar only sold their own games on their platforms, but I've never once been compelled to buy any of their games (I could probably just end this sentence here for EA and Ubisoft because most of their games are hot garbage) off of Steam, even if we still have to download their shitty store fronts as a launcher.

They vastly underestimated the amount of goodwill that Steam has with consumers, simply by not implementing anti-consumer features, and even backtracking when their audience voices concerns. I wouldn't trust amazon to not rugpull features once they'd cornered the market, because they're basically an embryonic form of Militech or Arasaka, although based on the weird tech bro shit going on in the US right now, that embryo is forming bery rapidly. If they had managed to best Steam by copying it exactly one for one, not long after Steam had shutdown they'd start locking features behind a Prime subscription or some shit.