I think there’s a difference between them being a good company for customers and them being a digital fief. Similar to how Amazon could be seen as a “good” company by customers (return policy, cheap stuff, etc), but they essentially own an entire marketplace and decides who sells products, and extracts rents from people who are making good innovative stuff. Steam is the same way.
Of course, Valve doesn’t have the mistreatment of employees Amazon does. They have no internal hierarchy, which is cool and I imagine means less management involvement. Their president seems to just want to make gamers happy, and thats great too.
Theyre an anomaly in the business world because they’re seemingly a great company that doesn’t follow monetization trends, while still being hugely financially successful. But they still extract rents from videogame makers, so leftists see that as a black eye.
Agree with most you say. Just two things
Steam doesn’t own the market place, as said, gog and itch.io do their stuff, epic is also there (nobody with a brain likes them but they still have a share) and then a publisher could just make a website for their game, Minecraft for example.
They don’t decide either, the algorithms within steam work very clearly and their seasonal sales are from my knollage open sign up for the devs and publishers. The player specific feeds also work according to tags, play a lot of builder games recently? Steam recommends similar games you might like, sometimes mixes between tags you haven’t played like that.
In reality it’s almost exclusively up to the devs/publishers and the players what gets sold steam does push indie stuff a little more in recent years but I don’t see the downside of that.
And secondly.
“Leftist” real left people would be happy that steam is how it is and would bring constructive criticism. The people screaming Steam bad, are the same people that scream everything else when they get cloud from it.
I see what you’re getting at, and I agree to an extent. Steam doesn’t own the whole marketplace, but they do own their whole marketplace, which is the biggest. So I think the issue for leftists that I’m referring to is the rents aspect – profiting off of the value of other people’s work.
You could argue steam adds some value to accessing games in one place, or that they need to be able to maintain their servers in order to maintain efficient distribution for publishers. But in terms of classical economics Steam doesn’t produce a product, I think it’s arguable they provide a service, and I think their capital is mostly a product of their ownership of cloud capital. When a company makes money based mostly on the ownership of an asset, be it land or machinery or computers, that’s where leftists take umbrage. Not liberals or Democrats necessarily, just leftists.
But that all said I still like Steam and Valve overall.
These “leftists” have a screw loose. Servers are a money sink, especially regarding electricity costs. Its not a property they own its a service they provide that costs a lot, servers have gigantic upkeep compared to real estate or similar.
These “leftists” as said aren’t actually left, they are identity political cloud farmers and no life trolls. Actual left people don’t hate on reality for the sake of it. Shit costs money and actual left people know and accept that. Shure you could argue that steam needs to pay more taxes around the world and I would even agree, that’s a leftist take, but brain rot morons shitting on people doing business isn’t left, its dumb.
