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Useful to note that Prime Gaming has been doing the exact same strategy (for longer), backfilling users' catalogs by throwing a lot of money in games giveaways. Once the games have been added to your Amazon/Twitch today you can download an EXE installer from a hard to find Amazon page or use a really bland "Twitch Launcher" app that clearly is the first stage towards "Vapor" or whatever the final brand would be. For a lot of Amazon Prime users that pay attention to the Prime Gaming page month to month and click the bright shiny green "Claim" buttons whenever they show up, Amazon can just go "look at all the games you already 'own'" when they start actually marketing it as its own store.



It ought to be illegal for a 100B+ market cap company to operate in this way. They can just pour money at the problem until the incumbents shrivel up and die. Hyper fucking bad behavior that leaves the true innovators and people that care out in the cold.

On the other hand, it should be possible for consumers to claim products they own on different platforms by peering a list of their their owned (licensed) products.


The early 20th century put a lot of Monopoly and Trust Busting laws on the books that say some of this is illegal, not just "ought to be". What we've lost since then hasn't seemed to be the laws themselves but the willpower to regulate in the spirit of those laws and executive power to enforce those laws.


Tech companies engaging in monopolistic practices to destroy competition? You don't say.

It happened to me. If you're in the industry long enough, I'll wager it happens to you too.




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