No, yeah, Steam's business model is very comparable to Youtube's. That's my exact point. I've made that specific comparison elsewhere here. I don't know how long you've been around the "Fediverse", but when you're not actively defending a corporation you like way more than a human should like a corporation that's not typically considered a defense around these parts.

But hey, yeah, that's a good mental model for it.

Look, I'm aware of the work Steam and other gaming first parties do. Like, very aware. Way more aware than most. You're Internetsplaining the crap out of this to me right now. And I'm telling you Steam has been actively cutting down the amount of those things they do based on their quasi-monopolistic positioning. Their entire business model and concept is to create a platform that runs itself (or is crowdsourced to its audience and creators as much as possible). That goes all the way down to content creation, discoverability, curation and more. Their idea is to do game-publishing-as-social-media.

I have very mixed feelings about that, but I don't think it's fundamentally invalid. They've staved off enshittification so far because they have SO much money and they're a private company, so they aren't mandated to drive endless growth out of that model.

The observation I'm making is that Steam hangs in the same space, ideology and business practices as Amazon or Youtube, but they absolutely don't get the same crap for it as Amazon and Youtube. Which demonstrates a somewhat horrifying fact: It's not the existence of the billionaires like Musk, the monopolistic behavior like Amazon or the black-box gig economy algorithm that pisses people off. It's just the enshittifiation of the end product. If the incentive system in publicly traded companies wasn't so terrible at doing its job people would just live in the shadow of Google and Amazon and Twitter for the rest of their lives and actively love it.

I mean, I guess in a way it's comforting, in that it's proof positive that the liberal assumptions about the market self-regulating optimally are absolutely wrong, but it's still kinda disappointing to see the true power of branding.