I occasionally see people say things like “Why did Valve do X” or “Why doesn’t Steam work like Y?” And while I think more and more of us are aware of the answers to those questions by this point, as Valve’s strategy with Steam becomes more clear over the years, it could still be worth saying out loud.
I figured I’d throw my two cents into why Steam is the way it is and why it will always work better for certain types of games than other types of games.
Obviously, markets do not produce just outcomes - if the purpose of a system is what it does, markets exist to concentrate wealth and perpetuate their own existence. But generally the more the market has rewarded you personally the more motivated you are to identify with it and rationalize your path, your choices, as being smart and correct and deserving. And the market is in turn constantly sifting the creator population for those whose goals already most closely resemble what the market currently "wants" - in effect it tells anyone who doesn't have any deeper convictions what to dream, what to value and what to ignore. When people say something like "let the market decide" they are saying "the system's current tendencies, in all their arbitrarity and unfairness and path-dependence (subject to centuries of hereditary wealth, class struggle etc) should continue to reproduce as-is". From that perspective, individual opinions are random vectors of inefficiency that only benefit markets in aggregate if they "stir the pot" in ways that create ever more capital - novelty and creativity, as drives independent of that, are merely entropy.
This is obviously a very weird way to think about a creative medium, a thing humans do just because they enjoy it, like dancing or running. But it's the reasoning that has eaten everything, because capital seeks above all to reproduce and concentrate itself. And people who wind up benefitting the most from that identify with it, and call that "merit".
