In Chapter 4, I define markets as fields of strategic action based on Fligstein's theoretical framework (2001). I point out that Fligstein offers a relevant approach to analysing the interplay between diverse actors in a market context. While Granovetter points out that economic actors are also social actors enmeshed in social networks (1985), Fligstein describes the ‘politics’ that are played out within and between firms on markets as fields of strategic action. These politics concern ‘intra-firm’ negotiations to settle on specific ‘conceptions of control’ that set the direction for said firms’ strategies in the market (2001: 35). They also concern the specific ‘market orders’ that emerge between companies in market contexts as a way of handling competition between them (2001: 16). Thus, Fligstein, along with Beckert, points out that competition does not represent an ideal state of affairs but rather a problem to be handled through various kinds of coordination. Indeed, the state of competition often heralded as the ideal in classic economics is a characteristic of emerging markets and is typically replaced with more stable orders where ‘incumbents’ divide the world between them to keep ‘challengers’ out as a market matures. In this chapter, I will analyse the way game titles and publishers are distributed across the different contexts of economic exchange offered on the Steam platform from this perspective. Firstly, I will discuss the different types of market actors present on the Steam platform and how Valve's combined status as a game developer, game publisher, and platform owner calls for a reinterpretation of Fligstein's framework. As an extension of this, I will map in more detail how these challengers and incumbents transform the platform as an ‘environment of expected use’ (Light et al, 2018) into a specific market order. I discuss how this market order can be interpreted as a way of handling competition and how the Steam platform design can be said to ‘materialize’ a specific governance structure. Before I embark on this analysis, however, I will present the data that forms the basis of this analysis.

A few words on method

To analyse the market order on the Steam platform, I have collected data using the Steam API and augmented this with data collected directly from the user interface.