Gaming IndustrySteamValve’s former economist says Steam could produce ‘better macroeconomic forecasts’ than Goldman Sachs with the power of crowdsourcing and brownie pointsWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Gaming IndustrySteamValve’s former economist says Steam could produce ‘better macroeconomic forecasts’ than Goldman Sachs with the power of crowdsourcing and brownie pointsWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Steam’s dominance of digital PC game sales is fearsome. In a2021 survey, more than a quarter of game dev studios reported that they make over 50% of their yearly revenue from Steam sales. Despite its successes, however, Valve’s former economist says the company could’ve been even more terrifyingly powerful.
As an example, Varoufakis imagined a game where you might get “brownie points or credit points if you predict next month’s inflation rate more accurately than the Fed.” While Varoufakis doesn’t specify in the interview, you can pretty quickly imagine how that might’ve contributed to a reputation system where contributors with accurate predictions would’ve been weighted higher, gradually producing more accurate forecasts.
“I am of the belief that had that happened,” Varoufakis said, “then Valve would be able to produce better macroeconomic forecasts for the American economy or the global economy than the [International Monetary Fund] or Goldman Sachs.”
While imagining the alternate timeline where Valve has become a lynchpin for global investment banking feels to me like a dystopian nightmare, Varoufakis told Aftermath that Valve’s game-focused myopia has meant the company has made it “less interesting” to him than it was during the heyday of the hat economy. For Varoufakis, Valve fell prey to the poison of selling too much junk.
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“Commodification won,” Varoufakis said. “There were important values in there that commodification has destroyed, but that’s what commodification does.”
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