if we take the concept of the antimarket seriously, then this is what platformization as monopolization is about - every industry trends towards monopoly, but monopolies hate markets. Superprofits and domination by their natre distort the theoretical "perfect market".

Steam dominates awkwardly. You can sell your products on it or not - but the scale of competition in the digital games industry, especially in the indie / horror subgenre, makes it such that if you can't sell on mobile Steam is the only place you could likely make back your investment.

the history of steam is indicative of its awkward power: it's, in some ways, an accident that Valve came to dominate digital distribtion for PC games. I don't know if that team wanted to open it up to indies when it was first concieved. But eventually indies were able to upload and sell.

Peck and Phillips say the platform capitalism's real home is that of the antimarket, "a murky but dominating layer located above the competition, where it operates as a new machine with an old purpose: that of controlling markets from above..."

My colleague Anne Mette Thorhauge wrote a book about Steam as a tangled market. One thing that really hit me hard in it was the concept of platforms as 'antimarkets' that she found in this Peck and Phillips article, drawn from the work of Fernand Braudel sociologica.unibo.it/article/view...

for some reason Jazz Jackrabbit Holiday Hare exists like a bullet fragment in my brain

Thanks Gavin! Yeah they have been super supportive and great so far too. Really welcoming.

Thanks Lewis!!

thanks Carolyn!

aw thanks Nav!!

I'm also really happy to be working with @brisunipress.bsky.social press, who have put out a bunch of really excellent works on digital technology, platforms, and critical sociology in recent years.

It's the book I've always wanted to write: a focused look at the digital games industry on the intersection of the process of platformization and political economy. The driving question at its core is what happens when the growth offered (often promised) by platformization stops?

some fast&excellent analysis from @superjoost.bsky.social yesterday also looked at the way that Scopely used their warchest to drastically increase the revenue of Monopoly Go!. Not many ownership groups have 1 trillion in the fund to dump money into marketing superjoost.substack.com/p/electronic...

after our analysis we argued that the Saudi PIF is interested in income diversification AND sportswashing / branding / soft power.