In an interview with Aftermath magazine, former Valve economist Yanis Varoufakis says that the company has unintentionally prototyped the digital economic hellscape we are currently forced into. This hellscape is the subject of his book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, published earlier this year, which he helped create that which he called "the capitalism of the world. [As Varoufakis says, we no longer live under capitalism. Instead, he says, we are in an era of "techno-feudalism," born of and replacing capitalism. According to the economist, an essential feature of this new era is algorithmic fiefdoms masquerading as marketplaces. Amazon is a prime example, as is Apple's App Store.

According to Varoufakis, it was during his time at Valve that he developed a platform that incorporated, structured, and monetized community interactions such as TF2's hat trading that helped pave the way for the digital lords that followed.Valve's in-game store and Steam marketplace was born out of the need to balance monetization and the fear that if the company did not create its own system for player-to-player exchange, "it would be completely impossible to take it outside and regulate it," Varoufakis says.

Varoufakis admitted that if Valve is part of the transition to techno-feudalism, then it has had a hand in the process. As he told Aftermath, Valve's monetization strategy was informed by his work investigating those player economies and advising them on how to manage their stability.

"My main project was to study the economy, to figure out its dynamics, what determines prices and what determines the distribution of income," said Varoufakis, who feared that Valve would crack down on the aftermarket for unregulated in-game goods Valve's fear was that without policing the aftermarket for unregulated in-game products, it risked creating a financial and legal mess that would "undermine the company's profits."

In the years since then, these fears have proven valid, and Valve has been forced to crack down on CS:GO's gambling aftermarket several times. First in 2016 in response to state gambling regulators, and again in 2023 when CS:GO skins were used as a medium for cryptocurrency laundering.

Although Balfakis states that Valve's architects "did not want to create technological feudalism," the system Valve built to manage player exchanges, based in part on his analysis, created "a new rent-seeking dynamic" and monetized Steam of the digital PC gaming market, further pushing it toward greater dominance of the market. From the formalization of loot boxes, to the implementation of real-money player marketplaces, to the establishment of Valve's own taxable domain status through esoteric promotional algorithms, Balfakis argues that Steam's early techno-feudalist monetization playbook It claims to have drawn a draft.

Whatever the original intent, Valve "became as much a part of the problem as anyone participated in the creation of capitalism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries," says Varoufakis.