I came pretty close to buying an index off marketplace (blegh) but then I snapped myself out of it. I’m really really hoping Deckard offers some innovation over what is currently available in terms of VR, and that it is a mostly open platform.
Whew thank you. You’re the only person in this thread that has actually made good points about your opinion, instead of trying to be snarky or clever with one-liners. I’m in almost total agreement with you, although I still won’t condemn those types of protests. I think they are probably more harmful than useful, but I understand the place it comes from is one of frustration with the absolute ridiculousness of our world and the powers that run it. I sympathize with those types of protesters, and what I assume is their frustration with the ineffectiveness of bottom-up solutions (to me, preferred) in the face of mass contributors to the problem – heads of government, corporations, etc.
Once again thanks for the actual good-faith and thoughtful response.
Wow you’re so great! thanks to you, climate change is now a thing of the past! Oh, wait…
(obviously, in jest. that’s great you do that. You probably should’ve said something like that to begin with)
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I think the whole point of acts like you describe show how you (people) care more about a painting than the continual ravaging of life on this planet by those who seek wealth and power.
What does the Mona Lisa matter when more and more of the worlds population is scrapping to survive under constant threat of environmental and economic collapse and war brought on by the people who host and visit such works of art.
One man has control over the widest-spanning and quickest-to-establish communication systems during natural disaster scenarios. He has previously used this control to affect military operations of sovereign nations. He also has control over one of the largest social media platforms. Now, he is in the ear of the soon-to-be worlds most powerful person. (Assuming that person isnt already him, himself.)
Get involved locally before it is too late for your community.
The Eye of the Storm, The Anarchist Response to Hurricane Helene
Teacher: “Slavery was bad.”
Republicans: “We need to end this indoctrination of our children.”
It is already broken – and he has succeeded – is what I’m getting at. But Democrats will still try to use the thing.
I fucking hate how I agree with Jesse Watters when he says
It’s also crazy that they call this guy a dictator and when he won they’re like “Oh we’re gonna help you transition,”
The Republican party is done with any sort of politeness or goodwill, to the point of not conceding elections. They are breaking the system and rebuilding it in the aftermath. You can’t stop them from breaking the thing by using the thing itself.
It doesn’t walk in saying, “Our programme means militias, mass imprisonments, transportations, war and persecution.”
Yeah but evidently it does, and people still choose it.
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.
Thank you. I don’t think I’m being stupid, but you have made me think about it a lot, so I appreciate that. You are right that the online marketplace is not a fixed resource, that’s not technically right at all. I was thinking for a long time, “did I misunderstand that?” I certainly didn’t think about the input vs output aspect of production. This led me to do some more reading and here’s what I’ve got.
I do still think Steam is factor of production in that it is a capital good, like a business complex. The problem with your outputs argument, I think, is outputs are the quantity and quality of goods or services produced in a given time period. Well, for the devs, there really isn’t an output in the traditional productive sense. They didn’t produce a bunch of cars, creating X amount of value through their labor. The value is only created when copies are sold, and in that sense Steam, and other game stores are inputs in the value created by a game dev. I think one could even make an argument that publishers provide a service and Steam is involved in that as a factor of production, but I think that speaks more to the strangeness of the software market in general. Anyways thanks for actually taking the time, I got to learn some cool stuff and feel a little humbled in the process so that is good
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.
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.
Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber is a cool book about this whole topic