this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
35 points (63.0% liked)
PC Gaming
8760 readers
745 users here now
For PC gaming news and discussion. PCGamingWiki
Rules:
- Be Respectful.
- No Spam or Porn.
- No Advertising.
- No Memes.
- No Tech Support.
- No questions about buying/building computers.
- No game suggestions, friend requests, surveys, or begging.
- No Let's Plays, streams, highlight reels/montages, random videos or shorts.
- No off-topic posts/comments, within reason.
- Use the original source, no clickbait titles, no duplicates. (Submissions should be from the original source if possible, unless from paywalled or non-english sources. If the title is clickbait or lacks context you may lightly edit the title.)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Steam is a service provider, they don't rent out shit. They do the marketing, distribution and payment processing. They are not rent. Idk what definition of rent is stuck in your head but I think that definition needs some reinstall, apparently its corrupted and fucked up the definition of Services.
A rent is something you get for giving someone property for money and still own it.
A service is (for example) when you distribute a product for someone and market it to people that might want it.
Big difference, and exactly what I don't like about the nowadays leftists, speak a lot without knowing theory and definitions. Make the movement look like anti realistic morons that fight ghosts.
Oh and yes I'm absolutely financially interested in the suffering of others... Where is the diviece from that you made this comment with?
In neoclassical economics, economic rent is any payment (in the context of a market transaction) to the owner of a factor of production or resource, supply of which is fixed.[1] In classical economics, economic rent is any payment made (including imputed value) or benefit received for non-produced inputs such as location (land) and for assets formed by creating official privilege over natural opportunities (e.g., patents). In the moral economy of neoclassical economics, economic rent includes income gained by labor or state beneficiaries of other "contrived" (assuming the market is natural, and does not come about by state and social contrivance) exclusivity, such as labor guilds and unofficial corruption.
Edit: In case anyone needs this broken down: Online videogame marketplaces are a resource. The supply of online videogame marketplaces is fixed. Valve is the owner of the largest online videogame marketplace, Steam. The publisher of a videogame pays Valve to list their game on Steam. A payment to the owner of a resource, the supply of which is fixed, is economic rent. Imagine how low you gotta be to downvote Wikipedia.
I think you need to carefully read the quotes you just posted because they disagree with what you're saying.
I don't think they do, but if so I'm happily ready to admit I'm wrong. How do you find my interpretation wrong?
A market is not a resource. It's not coal in the ground that Valve came along, dug up, and provides to people for a fee. They built the whole market, it's theirs, and they built it when there were no guidelines or examples to follow either. If you want your game on there it requires a mutual benefit because if only the game makers benefit then there won't be a market anymore due to no doubt astronomical costs of servers, development, moderation, etc. If there were no charges there'd be no market and publishers would have to sell their games on the remaining markets which, at the time of Steam's creation, was nowhere and even now is multiple inferior places.
Appreciate you actually inputting your view.You're right in that I was mixing colloquial terms with technical ones, and thus my statements were wrong, or at least misleading. A market is not a resource, but a marketplace can be a factor of production, the owner of which is paid a rent.
When I referred to the online marketplace of Steam as a resource, I was comparing Steam to a marketplace, like a business complex, which is a capital good and a factor of production for businesses operating out of the business complex. Those businesses operating out of the complex pay a rent to the owner of that business complex. We don't see traditional production in the games industry, wherein if you as a business have produced X amount of output, you have also created X amount of income. With cars or grain or tangible products, when you turn inputs into outputs, you own the value of the outputs. That's not true for a videogame, whose value comes from the sale. In that sense, Steam is a factor of production in that value-creation process -- it is an input -- and as such, game devs pay a rent to Valve for that.
I'm not saying there are no operational costs for Steam. All I'm saying is they charge a form of rent to the creators of videogames. That rent may encapsulate other benefits, like being put on the front of the Steam store (marketing), analytics, tools for devs to interact with customers, etc. But it is still rent, since it comes in my opinion before the value is created.
I mean, there is a reason the individual in the article, and Valve's own former resident economist Yanis Varoufakis refer to Steam as a digital fiefdom. It is a digital equivalent of peasants paying a rent to work on an owner's land. In this case, Steam as a factor of production is not land, but capital.
Then again, I'm not an economist. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.