In Chapter 2, I introduced the notion of ‘platform configurations’ to cover the development of game platforms across the previous four decades. I observe that it is not just the game platforms themselves that have changed but also the very concept of ‘platform’, which has altered its meaning from signifying a computational system to signifying large market actors in Big Tech. Thus, the notion of ‘platform configurations’ includes the platform as a standardized computing system along with another range of factors that constitute contemporary platforms, such as market orders, ownership structures, and value chains. The specific role of the platform as a standardized computing system varies across these configurations from being primarily development and publishing devices to including storefronts and shaping multi-sided markets. The latter involves that platforms are strategically designed to shape market interactions (Srnicek, 2017) in ways that serve the economic interest of the platform owner. In the current chapter, I will analyse in more detail how this is specifically done by the Steam platform, that is, I will analyse the way the platform's API allows third-party actors to operate on the platform though a critical reading of the documentation. The aim is to map and discuss the ways in which the different contexts of economic exchange are made available as sets of strategic design choices by the platform design, more specifically, through the Steamworks API. The Steam platform design shapes the rules of transaction, one of the basic components of the market institution as defined by Fligstein (Fligstein, 1996, 2001), and the diverse arrays of economic interaction enabled through this design lay the ground for Steam's tangled market (see Chapter 3), that is, complex market contexts containing several interconnected and mutually dependent markets and domains of interaction (see Chapter 3).

Critical analyses of digital platform architectures

The critical analysis of platforms has received a great deal of academic attention during the previous decade and quite a few relevant approaches exist. In her critical history of social media, José van Dijck combines actor network theory and political economy. While the first approach emphasizes ‘co-evolving networks of technology and people’, the second highlights ‘the political-economic context in which informational networks grow into powerful industrial players’ (2013: 26–7).