Cover Games in the Platform Economy
Games in the Platform Economy
Steam’s Tangled Markets

4: Valve Corporation and the Steam Platform

Publication Date:
29 Sep 2023
Pages:
56–62
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51952/9781529223064.ch004
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In the next four chapters, I will provide an empirically grounded analysis of the Steam platform as a particular type of game platform. I will do this because the Steam platform exhibits a distinct platform business model rooted in the economic features of games. Steam is, on one hand, comparable to other market platforms, with its focus on attracting game publishers and gamer communities into a multi-sided market controlled by the platform owner. On the other hand, it differs from other platforms in its active integration of player-driven economies at different levels of its platform design. This turns Steam into a direct illustration of the way platforms can be defined and analysed as ‘tangled markets’, extracting value at the intersection between different market contexts. In the following sections, I will firstly provide some historical context of Valve, the owner of Steam, and situate the Steam platform within the wider game market. After this, I will address how the platform differs from other platforms and why this makes it an interesting case of ‘tangled markets’. I will use the key differences between Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (Valve, 2012) and Fortnite (2018) to exemplify how this specific business model cuts across the game design, the platform, and economic practices beyond the platform (Thorhauge and Nielsen, 2021).

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  • Valve and Gearbox Software (1998) Half-Life. Digital game distributed by Sierra online and Valve.

  • Valve and Hidden Path Entertainment (2012) Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Digital game distributed by Valve.

  • Verant Interactive and 989 Studios (1999) Everquest. Digital game distributed by Sony Entertainment and Ubisoft.

  • VRChat Inc. (2017) VRChat. Virtual Wordl distributed by VRChat Inc.

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