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.
Even some of these features are transparent to users but not to devs, for example to say few:
Multiplayer (big one)
Microtransactions (eww!)
Steam Audio (support for specific Audio stuff, not voice)
Steam cloud (Save games)
DRM
Input
Key management
Playtest
Steam Voice
Valve Anti-Cheat
Stats and achievements
Workshop
and not as important but relevant to some:
Virtual Reality support
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.
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.