Games

Which is terse, wildly hyperbolic (even if we assume I'm seriously wrong, it does not follow that more than one of those things is misunderstood), and asserting that I don't know what fucking rent is, among other things.

Terse sure, but I don't see hyperbole in it and at the very least I do not think that we have the same understanding of what rent is. That's why I essentially asked you to define it, and you didn't. You just reasserted that charging a fee for a service counts as rent. Is the guy who fixes the broken window extracting rent from the landlord who called him?

My understanding of the word rent is that it is a fee charged by a private property owner for the use of that private property. Developers aren't renting use of the private property that is Steam, they are making use of a wide variety of services, such as file hosting and payment processing and advertising.

Additionally, modern landlords frequently do engage in some amount of labor,

Yes of course some of them do, that's not really relevant. There's nothing stopping a landlord from doing the labor of a manager or a construction worker or a landscaper. Notice none of those things are called "landlording." They're not paid because they do landscaping, they're paid because they're the landlord. They're paid for owning the property, not for what (if any) labor they do. That's why it's bad.

If all landlords on Earth were compensated for what labor they do and otherwise weren't paid, being a landlord wouldn't be bad. And they also wouldn't be landlords. They would be called landscapers and construction workers and managers and so on.

In many feudal societies, "landlord" was a somewhat different title that referred to people who owned land and allowed peasants to work on it in exchange for some amount of the harvest, which was rent. Free peasants, i.e. people who weren't serfs, etc., could theoretically try to find some other way of getting food, including sometimes also owning tiny plots themselves or going to some other landlord, but ultimately their best option was often submitting to terrible exploitation by a landlord because that was their least bad choice.

You once again compare Steam requesting a fee in exchange for the labor their workers do with landlords requesting a fee for nothing.

Fundamentally, a huge amount of what most devs are paying their cut for is the mere privilege of being on a platform with such a huge userbase, meaning it usually is their best option to make money if they don't already have a name for themselves (and sometimes even then). The amount they pay is undoubtedly tied to this fact, and that is rent extraction.

That is marketing. Nobody who uses Steam is incapable of downloading a game that isn't on Steam. The reason having your game on Steam is so valuable is because Steam will advertise the game for you in exchange for that cut of sales.