I mean I feel like it would be better for you to explain how it is similar to rent extraction.
Landlords are people who had nothing to do with the construction of the home and are providing no service. They don’t deserve to be paid because they aren’t doing anything. And you can’t just decide not to pay them and go somewhere else, because you have to live in a house.
None of this is remotely similar to Steam in any way. You don’t have to put your game on Steam if you don’t want to pay them, and if you do put your game on Steam and pay them it’s because you want the service they are providing. Everything that is bad about a landlord is something that doesn’t apply here.
The fact that I don’t need to put a game on Steam to live in an immediate biological sense has no bearing on whether what they are doing is rent extraction or not, that’s just hot air sophistry in the direction of “game devs are really happy about this arrangement, actually” to sort of give a vibe that it’s good and not rent (which is bad , and therefore not this). Something being “merely” an income rather than directly the necessity that the income is used to pay for is completely irrelevant. You are seriously just using redditor arguments.
Epic and others also extract rent, this isn’t a claim about moral value but about economics. Moralism has no place in Marxism.
Additionally, modern landlords frequently do engage in some amount of labor, or are theoretically legally obliged to anyway (depending on the jurisdiction). For example, based on the terms of the tenancy, it is often up to them to get contractors in to do repairs, which for simplicity we can call a type of managerial labor, in the case that they don’t fix things themselves.
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.
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. Yes, many make use of patching and some make use of various online services, but it’s not like they can “opt out” of those being available to them, they aren’t services that are offered independently of the huge platform, and more games than you might expect do just fine with the old-fashioned patching approach that you see on websites like itch.
Have I given you enough material for you to now deign to enlighten me on the voluntary nature of the free market under this merit monopoly?
Point taken. Could we perhaps come to an agreement to not talk down to each other, in that case? See your earlier reply:
This feels like a severe misunderstanding of what rent is, why it’s bad, and what Steam is.
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.
If you see fit to curb what I’m sure you view as a minor affectation, then please proceed on the actual subject matter, unless you want me to rewrite my previous comment to be more suitable.
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.
I mean I feel like it would be better for you to explain how it is similar to rent extraction.
Landlords are people who had nothing to do with the construction of the home and are providing no service. They don’t deserve to be paid because they aren’t doing anything. And you can’t just decide not to pay them and go somewhere else, because you have to live in a house.
None of this is remotely similar to Steam in any way. You don’t have to put your game on Steam if you don’t want to pay them, and if you do put your game on Steam and pay them it’s because you want the service they are providing. Everything that is bad about a landlord is something that doesn’t apply here.
The fact that I don’t need to put a game on Steam to live in an immediate biological sense has no bearing on whether what they are doing is rent extraction or not, that’s just hot air sophistry in the direction of “game devs are really happy about this arrangement, actually” to sort of give a vibe that it’s good
and not rent (which is bad 
, and therefore not this). Something being “merely” an income rather than directly the necessity that the income is used to pay for is completely irrelevant. You are seriously just using redditor arguments.
Epic and others also extract rent, this isn’t a claim about moral value but about economics. Moralism has no place in Marxism.
Additionally, modern landlords frequently do engage in some amount of labor, or are theoretically legally obliged to anyway (depending on the jurisdiction). For example, based on the terms of the tenancy, it is often up to them to get contractors in to do repairs, which for simplicity we can call a type of managerial labor, in the case that they don’t fix things themselves.
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.
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. Yes, many make use of patching and some make use of various online services, but it’s not like they can “opt out” of those being available to them, they aren’t services that are offered independently of the huge platform, and more games than you might expect do just fine with the old-fashioned patching approach that you see on websites like itch.
Have I given you enough material for you to now deign to enlighten me on the voluntary nature of the free market under this merit monopoly?
Why are you being such an asshole? I do not want to have a conversation with someone who is behaving like this.
Point taken. Could we perhaps come to an agreement to not talk down to each other, in that case? See your earlier reply:
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.
If you see fit to curb what I’m sure you view as a minor affectation, then please proceed on the actual subject matter, unless you want me to rewrite my previous comment to be more suitable.
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.
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.
You once again compare Steam requesting a fee in exchange for the labor their workers do with landlords requesting a fee for nothing.
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.