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.