“Play, Connect, Create”: Delineating Valve’s Steam Platformisation Strategy Through its Affordances

Abstract

One could argue that we live in the era of digital platforms: organisations, which by accumulating and analysing our data, aim at maximising not only their revenues but also their strategic vantage points in our ‘datafied’ society. Platformisation has, thus, come to connotate the dipole of ubiquity and standardisation that digital platforms aim to achieve via numerous sociotechnical features. Steam, since its inauguration in 2003, has amassed thousands of titles of video-games, attracting millions of users, placing itself as the leading digital distributor of videogames. However, during the last decade, Steam has progressively adopted the model of a social entertainment platform by adopting characteristics that were previously only found on social media, while ‘pushing’ a gamification of its own platform. Therefore, with this thesis I am contending that Steam has fully adopted a platformisation strategy, aiming to consolidate its position within and across the video-game distribution, and industry in general. To accentuate and delineate this development, I have chosen to proceed with an affordance analysis of three unique Steam features that interconnect in order to create the necessary conditions for the aforesaid strategy to take place. Finally, I have constructed my analysis’ findings according to four patterns, which are, essentially, the cornerstones of Steam’s complex platformisation mechanism.