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.
These “leftists” have a screw loose. Servers are a money sink, especially regarding electricity costs. Its not a property they own its a service they provide that costs a lot, servers have gigantic upkeep compared to real estate or similar.
These “leftists” as said aren’t actually left, they are identity political cloud farmers and no life trolls. Actual left people don’t hate on reality for the sake of it. Shit costs money and actual left people know and accept that. Shure you could argue that steam needs to pay more taxes around the world and I would even agree, that’s a leftist take, but brain rot morons shitting on people doing business isn’t left, its dumb.
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 came to think of a good analogy!
Steam is the guy that build up a stand on a farmers market and sells his goods and the goods from the people in his village that don’t want to brother with the work to drive a hour to the city and set up a stand and stay there all ray long.
The steam guy does a service and keeps a agreed upon portion of the sales for his needs.
Its not rent, rent is what the steam guy has to pay as a stand fee.
Yes, being against RENT is left, but steam is a store not a property that is rented, a real store also needs to pay its employees and profits from selling stuff. Its not rent. Its not passive income either, steam as a store is under constant maintenance and upkeep.
And i know what liberal means, liberal means less government involvement, however liberals opposite is authoritarian, not left. Left doesn’t need to be authoritarian even though it tends to become in real life.
I’m a liberal, moderately conservative, leftist, and yes all these terms have separate meanings that don’t excluded each other. Liberal = Less state and government involvement, Conservative = doesn’t like cultural change (in my case its mostly about being realistic about things, so I could replace moderate conservative with realism, however realism isn’t a political terminology) and left is a economic/social orientation that wants to reduce wealth gap between poor and rich.
I have passive income, I’m literally profiting of of basically every war, doesn’t mean I want war, I just invented intelligently when it was too quite for some time. There are people that hate me for it, and i actually couldn’t care less. I make a dollar doing nothing and they don’t, I still go to work every day like a normal person and contribute with my work, Im also politically active, all the people that are loud and cry on the internet have something in common, their RL sucks and nobody cares about them.
Again, Rent and a service are different things. And people that don’t understand that are… Well, mistaken.
