Gamers have good reason to love Valve for Steam alone – not even accounting for their amazing games. They really do have the best gamer-oriented platform, and seemingly they care about gamers. I think they’ve done a lot to advance gaming on linux as well which is much appreciated.

But, at least the way I see it, they still extract rents from game devs to an almost feudal degree.

“Sure – come sell your grain game – but you’ll have to give me a third of your profit because I own the town square platform/servers.”

Side note: It’s pretty funny that for a while Valve had Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis on staff to analyze spontaneously emerging markets for digital items on Steam – and he went on to write about the phenomenon above in his recent book Technofeudalism.

Edit: formatting