For both of our sakes, I’ll limit the scope of my reply. I do appreciate the discussion (and I agree with several skipped points).

I’m not sure how its possible to think the product of a game is actually not just a game, but also everything else that the game requires in order to achieve some level of use-value. I mean, I feel like most people recognize that the computer is a separate product than the game. Or that when you buy a car – you’re not also buying the gas to run the car.

I think what makes this strange for me is that, in the case of valve code vs game dev code, they are the exact same material result of labor (lines of code), both doing the same thing with it (charging for access). Really, they even charge the same person (both take a majority cut from game buyers). I don’t understand how in this extremely parallel setting, valve gets singled out by LVT.