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This book examines the evolution of digital platform economies through the lens of online gaming.
Offering valuable empirical work on Valve’s ‘Steam’ platform, Thorhauge examines the architecture of this global online videogame marketplace and the way it enables new markets and economic transactions. Drawing on infrastructure, software, platform and game studies, the book interrogates the implications of these transactions, both in terms of their legality, but also in how they create new forms of immaterial labour.
Shedding new light on a previously under-explored branch of the study of digital platforms, this book brings a unique economic sociology perspective into the growing literature on videogame studies.
1. Introduction: Steam’s tangled markets
2. Platform configurations in gaming
3. Economic sociology and the analysis of platforms as markets
4. Valve corporation and the Steam platform
5. Steam’s business model
6. Shaping market interactions on the Steam platform
7. Economic actors on the steam platform
8. Player trading beyond Steam
9. User monetisation and value creation in tangled markets