In this chapter, I will describe and discuss the gradual development of the Steam platform's business model from a classic retail or multi-sided market to distinct ways of monetizing user participation that set it apart from other platforms. Gaming platforms such as PlayStation Store, Xbox Market, and Epic Games Store rely primarily on retail, and major media platforms such as YouTube rest on a relatively classic advertisement-based business model, where content is offered to users and advertisement space is sold to advertisers (Caraway, 2011). The primary difference between these platforms and traditional commercial media is the extensive collection of user data that enables a more granulated analysis and classification of user segments (Fourcade and Healy, 2017; Van Dijck et al, 2018) and the scope of commodification (Ørmen and Gregersen, 2022). Steam, on the contrary, denounces advertising as a way of monetizing games on the platform. That is, the platform does not offer a system for integrating ads with content as a way of monetizing users like the one featured by YouTube (see Ørmen and Gregersen, 2022) or the App Store, and the active participation of players on the platform is monetized in ways that differ considerably from the advertisement business model. On the one hand, passive and active player contributions are used to augment and further the effectiveness of the Steam store, that is, to offer ‘value-added services’ (Jöckel et al, 2008) on the platform. On the other hand, the scope of economic transactions is extended to turn players’ economic action into a source of revenue in addition to retail.

In this chapter, I will describe the way Steam's business model has developed throughout the platform's lifetime and argue that the monetization of its social connectedness is based on shaping and reorganizing social interactions as market interactions. That is, by ‘disembedding’ players’ economic action from the player-driven economies and gaming communities in which they originate, and reorganizing them as market interactions, the Steam platform converts the affective value players generate through their gameplay into market value that can be exchanged and put to use elsewhere. In the following, I will firstly provide a little more context of the Steam platform. After this, I will revisit the concept of embeddedness of economic action put forward in Chapter 3 and introduce the concepts of affective value and affective economies.