jwiggler

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?

Lmao you're the one misunderstanding rents here, you don't need to try to spin it around on me. If you think you're right, go ahead and tell me where I'm wrong based on that definition.

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.

The cut that Steam takes from publishers is a rent. It is the equivalent of buying property and allowing an individual or family to live in it, for a cut of their wages. The landowner and Steam do not produce anything -- they are a place, physical or virtual, for people to operate out of, at a cost. Steam is not a store that sells their own products, they are a platform that sells other people's stuff and they take a cut. If I own a big plot of land, and let a bunch of businesses operate on that land as long as they pay me monthly, I'm taking a rent. It's the same thing.

I feel like I don't even need to comment on your weird bragging about profiting off of war, but I'll just say this -- whether you like it or not, whether you are personally interested or not, you are financially interested in the suffering and death of other people. If you think that's morally okay, good for you. Personally, I think that's pretty monstrous. I'd wish you a good day, but after learning that, I hope you get some help.

Sorry dude, you have a right to your opinion -- but most of what you just said isn't true. I understand you think it's ridiculous, but being against rent extraction is a classically leftist political philosophy. You're right that it costs money to operate servers, but that doesn't mean those servers are not the property of Valve. They utilize that property to collect rent from publishers.

That fact is not well liked by leftists. By liberals? Sure, go nuts. But I think you're in the process of finding yourself in the latter camp, at the moment. I'd definitely encourage you to look up leftists vs liberals because I think you may have a misunderstanding.

Regardless, I agree the hate/vitriol can go overboard coming from these types of people. I agree with the political and philosophical underpinnings of their frustration, but we are all born into a rat race and taught that we should do anything to get out of it, so no one actually thinks about whether things like "passive income" are right or wrong. We are taught that's what you gotta shoot for, and I'm not going to blame someone for still believing that.

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.

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.