The Monetary Value of Being the Board

A Monopoly set contains many things.

There are tokens.

Cards.

Dice.

Money.

Rules.

Properties.

Each component matters.

Remove the dice and uncertainty disappears.

Remove the cards and part of the event structure disappears.

Remove a token and one player loses a way to represent themselves.

But the board plays a different role.

It establishes the shared state in which the other pieces become meaningful in relation to one another.

A token can occupy a property.

A player can pass another player.

A card can change someone's position.

Money can move because something happened somewhere.

The board does not create every action.

It creates the environment in which the actions can connect.

That is the useful metaphor.

Not that a sheet of cardboard is literally worth more than every other component.

But that there is economic value in occupying the position where otherwise independent participants encounter one another, accumulate history, exchange value, and become more useful together.

Gaming already has many valuable pieces.

Games.

Publishers.

Studios.

Creators.

Communities.

Storefronts.

Social systems.

Streaming services.

Mod platforms.

Competitive ecosystems.

Each can create value independently.

The more interesting economic question is what happens when one layer makes those pieces more valuable in relation to one another.

The idea is not new to economics.

Jean-Charles Rochet and Jean Tirole's work on two-sided markets describes platforms whose success depends on bringing distinct participant groups together. The value offered to one side can depend on participation from another, which means the platform's business model cannot be understood simply by looking at what it charges any one group.

Annabelle Gawer and Michael Cusumano make another distinction that matters here.

An internal platform helps one company efficiently produce a family of related products.

An external industry platform acts as a foundation on which outside innovators can build complementary products, technologies, and services.

That second definition is much closer to the board.

The platform does not create everything.

Its value can increase because other people create things on top of it.

That changes the economic logic.

A traditional product company asks:

How valuable can our product become?

A platform can ask:

How valuable can the environment become if other participants succeed inside it?

That is a different business.

And it requires a different way of thinking about ownership.

The phrase network effects is often used as though it explains everything.

It does not.

There are several different mechanisms through which a shared environment can become economically valuable, and they should not be blurred together.

Coordination Value

The board allows independent participants to find and interact with one another.

Players find games.

Players find other players.

Creators find audiences.

Communities find members.

Developers find distribution.

Services find demand.

The board creates value by reducing the friction between participants who would otherwise have to find one another independently.

Continuity Value

A persistent environment can carry information forward.

Identity.

Relationships.

Purchases.

History.

Reputation.

Preferences.

Achievements.

Communities.

Entitlements.

The participant does not begin from zero every time the activity changes.

That matters because accumulated context can make the next interaction more valuable than the first.

Distribution Value

Once participation already exists, new activity can be distributed through the environment.

A game can be discovered because a friend is playing it.

A creator can surface because a community is already active.

An old game can become relevant because something elsewhere in the ecosystem points back toward it.

Distribution becomes less dependent on attracting every participant from outside the system each time.

Cross-Side Value

More players can make the platform more attractive to creators and developers.

More creators and developers can make the platform more attractive to players.

This is the basic dynamic at the center of two-sided platform economics.

Transaction Value

Economic activity is easier where participation, identity, trust, payments, and discovery already exist.

That can include:

games,

services,

marketplaces,

subscriptions,

creator activity,

events,

digital goods,

advertising,

or other forms of commerce.

The point is not that every possible transaction should be monetized.

The point is that the board can create a common commercial layer around activity already occurring.

Risk-Reduction Value

There is another form of value that is less glamorous but potentially just as important.

Operating a platform requires solving difficult problems repeatedly:

payments,

fraud,

account security,

parental controls,

identity,

moderation,

trust and safety,

compliance,

global distribution,

support,

data handling,

and dispute resolution.

If every publisher rebuilds those systems independently, the industry reproduces the same infrastructure again and again.

A shared platform can potentially turn some of those duplicated burdens into common infrastructure.

That creates value even before another player arrives.

That may be one of the most important forms of leverage available to a platform.

Steam is often described as a storefront.

That description is incomplete.

Steamworks gives third-party developers access to common infrastructure around authentication, distribution, community features, commerce, Workshop integration, cloud functionality, matchmaking, achievements, inventory systems, and other services.

The strategic point is simple:

most of the games benefiting from those systems are not owned by Valve.

Steam demonstrates that a platform can create value by making thousands of independent products easier to distribute, operate, discover, update, monetize, and participate around.

Valve does not need to make every game for Steam to become more useful when those games succeed.

The games remain the pieces.

Steam provides part of the board.

That is why the word storefront understates the position.

A store helps people buy products.

A platform can help products become easier to operate, easier to find, easier to buy, and more valuable because they exist inside a larger system.

The difference is not semantic.

It is economic.

The strongest board does not simply collect rent from successful pieces.

Its economics improve when the pieces themselves become more valuable.

Fortnite's creator economy provides a useful example.

Epic's Creator Economy 2.0 places 40 percent of qualifying Fortnite net revenue into an engagement pool for eligible island publishers. The payout system explicitly considers whether an experience attracts new players or brings lapsed players back.

The structure matters.

A creator produces something valuable.

That thing gives someone another reason to enter or return to Fortnite.

Fortnite becomes more useful because the creator succeeded.

Epic then shares part of the resulting economic value back with the creator.

The creator and the board are not economically identical.

But they are not purely adversarial either.

The model works best when the creator's success increases the value of the larger environment.

That suggests a broader principle:

That is more durable than maximizing the percentage extracted from every transaction.

If the board makes participants more successful, their activity can create more reasons for everyone else to participate.

More games.

More creators.

More communities.

More transactions.

More discovery.

More re-engagement.

More cultural activity.

The board benefits because the environment becomes more useful.

That is fundamentally different from a tollbooth.

Roblox is one of the strongest examples of the opportunity.

It is also one of the strongest warnings against romanticizing it.

In 2025, Roblox reported approximately $4.89 billion in revenue, more than $1.50 billion in developer exchange fees, roughly $1.15 billion in infrastructure and trust-and-safety expense, and an operating loss of about $1.23 billion.

Those numbers should change the way the board is discussed.

Roblox demonstrates that a shared platform can support enormous economic activity generated by outside creators.

But it also demonstrates that operating the environment is expensive.

The board inherits responsibilities the pieces do not necessarily have to solve at the same scale.

Infrastructure.

Moderation.

Safety.

Fraud.

Payments.

Compliance.

Creator payouts.

Discovery.

Governance.

Data centers.

Support.

The board may reduce creative risk by allowing thousands of independent participants to create experiences.

But it assumes coordination risk.

That is not a reason to avoid the position.

It is a reason to understand its real economics.

The useful CFO question is therefore not:

Does being the board create activity?

Clearly it can.

The question is:

Does the value created by the shared environment exceed the cost of operating it?

That answer will vary by platform.

There is no automatic network-effect escape hatch from operating discipline.

This brings the argument closer to the existing structure of the industry.

Why does a publisher build a launcher?

Usually not because another launcher was missing from the world.

A launcher can give the publisher:

direct customer access,

better transaction economics,

control over identity,

control over distribution,

access to data,

promotional surfaces,

community presence,

strategic independence,

and leverage against another platform.

Those are rational goals.

If a publisher maintains its own platform layer, the right response is not to say that it should stop.

The better question is:

That is a much higher bar.

The board has to compete not just on audience size.

It has to compete on economics.

Infrastructure.

Control.

Trust.

Distribution.

Discovery.

Flexibility.

And sovereignty.

A publisher will not abandon independent infrastructure simply because another platform asks nicely.

The board has to make redundancy unattractive.

Most digital stores rely heavily on transaction percentages.

That model is simple.

The platform takes a share of revenue in exchange for distribution and infrastructure.

But it is not the only possible model.

Epic already demonstrates how far platform economics have moved from the old universal 30 percent assumption. Its store currently offers developers 100 percent of the first $1 million in annual net revenue per title, then reverts to an 88/12 developer-platform split.

That raises the competitive bar for any new board.

It cannot merely say:

We take less than the old stores.

It has to offer something structurally better.

One possibility is to separate platform access from transaction taxation.

A publisher might pay for infrastructure directly.

Smaller participants could still use a conventional revenue-share model.

Larger publishers could pay an annual platform subscription or negotiated infrastructure fee in exchange for lower marginal transaction costs.

Strategic participants could have custom agreements reflecting the scale of infrastructure, distribution, commerce, and support they consume.

The specific percentages would require modeling.

But the principle is important:

That changes the economic relationship.

The platform no longer has to maximize the percentage it takes from every successful piece.

It can make money because the participant chooses to use the infrastructure.

That creates a different CFO comparison.

Not:

Is 12 percent better than 30 percent?

But:

What does it cost us to operate independently, and what additional value do we gain by operating here?

That comparison includes costs such as:

distribution systems,

payment infrastructure,

global commerce,

customer support,

fraud prevention,

account recovery,

moderation,

parental controls,

identity systems,

social systems,

discovery,

analytics,

technical maintenance,

and compliance.

The board wins if its combined cost and value proposition is better than rebuilding those systems independently.

That is platform substitution.

And unlike simple storefront competition, it can create advantages even for a publisher that already has an audience.

Every platform extracts value.

Servers cost money.

Safety costs money.

Development costs money.

Support costs money.

Investors expect returns.

The relevant distinction is not extraction versus purity.

It is value extraction versus value creation.

A weak platform asks:

How much can we take from the activity already happening here?

A stronger platform asks:

How much more activity can participants create because the platform exists?

The difference matters.

If the board improves distribution, participants can reach people they could not efficiently reach alone.

If it reduces fraud, participants lose less value.

If it supplies compliance infrastructure, participants avoid duplicated operating costs.

If it carries identity and relationships across experiences, users have more reasons to remain active.

If it improves discovery, older or smaller pieces can find new demand.

If it makes commerce easier, more transactions can occur.

Then the platform is not merely dividing existing value.

It is helping increase the total amount of value available to divide.

That is the alignment problem.

When the publisher wins on the board, the board should win.

When the creator wins, the board should become more useful.

When the community becomes stronger, the platform should become more valuable.

If the board becomes richer while its participants become weaker, the architecture is probably drifting toward extraction.

This distinction becomes especially important when looking at Xbox.

Microsoft already possesses many of the things a platform might appear to need.

A persistent identity.

A social graph.

Achievements.

Commerce.

Subscriptions.

A game library.

First-party studios.

Third-party distribution.

Cloud infrastructure.

Console hardware.

PC distribution.

Mobile access.

A growing handheld presence through Windows.

The problem is not simply that Xbox lacks features.

The deeper question is whether those features cohere into the environment where the player's gaming life happens.

That is not the same thing.

A player can have years of Xbox history and still choose another platform as the center of their future gaming activity.

Consider a specific migration case.

A player spends years primarily on Xbox console.

They accumulate purchases.

Achievements.

Friends.

History.

Familiarity.

Possibly a substantial digital library.

Then they move into PC gaming for the first time.

In that case, they may have little or no preexisting Steam library.

Their accumulated platform history may be overwhelmingly Xbox.

If that player still chooses Steam as the environment around which their new PC gaming life is organized, then library size alone is not enough to explain platform gravity.

Nor is accumulated identity.

Nor is default presence.

The hypothesis worth testing is more structural:

That would mean Xbox has continuity without necessarily having destination value.

Steam's advantage would not simply be that it knows the player better.

It would be that more of the surrounding PC gaming ecosystem converges there.

Games.

Publishers.

Reviews.

Mods.

Community discussion.

Wishlists.

Discovery.

Friends.

Developer updates.

Marketplace activity.

Player-created content.

The important difference is not merely how many features exist.

It is how many meaningful relationships among participants are expressed through the same environment.

That distinction also changes the way Xbox's cross-device strategy should be evaluated.

Microsoft reported in fiscal 2025 that gaming revenue rose 9 percent, Xbox content and services revenue rose 16 percent, and Xbox hardware revenue fell 25 percent.

Those figures do not prove that hardware is becoming less important.

They describe the current proposition.

And the current proposition does not yet include the board described here.

That matters because there is no basis for assuming that hardware attached to a stronger ecosystem would behave the same way.

The board could make the box more valuable.

A console can offer strong performance, convenience, reliability, and price relative to a gaming PC built strictly for play.

If users still migrate toward other devices or other environments, the lesson should not automatically be that the box is obsolete.

It may mean the environment around the box is not compelling enough.

The same logic applies on PC.

Xbox can be available.

Xbox can be integrated into Windows.

Xbox can support console, PC, cloud, mobile, and handheld experiences.

But availability across endpoints is not the same as destination value.

That is the missing distinction.

Microsoft can unify access across devices.

The harder problem is unifying the player's gaming life.

Console.

PC.

Cloud.

Mobile.

Handheld.

Those are entrances.

The board is what gives the entrances somewhere to lead.

The opportunity is not to make hardware less important.

It is to make every endpoint more valuable because it opens onto the same larger environment.

The board is not automatically the winning position.

There are several ways the economics can break.

The Cost Becomes Too High

Roblox demonstrates that infrastructure, developer payouts, safety, and operations can consume enormous resources.

Scale can create leverage.

It can also create scale-dependent costs.

The Pieces Become Powerful Enough to Leave

A sufficiently large publisher may decide that direct distribution, first-party identity, and proprietary commerce are more valuable than participating in a shared board.

Network effects do not eliminate bargaining power.

They can create it on both sides.

The Board Becomes Extractive

If fees rise unpredictably, rules change without warning, or first-party products receive structural advantages, participants may conclude that independence is safer.

The board's leverage can destroy the trust that created the leverage.

Discovery Can Become Congested

A platform containing more things does not automatically make discovery better.

More supply can produce noise.

If visibility becomes scarce, the board may simply recreate the distribution problems it claimed to solve.

Network Effects Can Become Lock-In

Continuity is valuable.

But the same accumulated history, purchases, identity, and relationships that make participation useful can make exit expensive.

Earned retention and coercive switching costs are not the same thing.

Participants May Prefer Modularity

Discord, YouTube, Twitch, Steam, independent mod services, and publisher ecosystems demonstrate that specialized systems can create enormous value.

A board that tries to absorb everything may destroy the specialization that made those systems useful.

That is why the strongest board may not be the most centralized one.

The case has to remain narrower than the ambition.

The evidence supports several things strongly.

Platforms can create economic value by coordinating different participant groups.

External innovators can increase the value of a shared industry platform.

Fortnite demonstrates a model in which creator success can directly contribute to the health of the platform ecosystem and to the economics of the creators themselves.

Roblox demonstrates that shared creation can produce very large economic activity, while also showing that the board itself can be expensive to operate.

Epic demonstrates that platform competition can increasingly include alternative economic relationships rather than assuming a fixed 30 percent distribution tax.

Microsoft demonstrates that the economic relationship with gaming already extends well beyond the initial hardware transaction, while its current hardware performance cannot tell us what demand would look like under a substantially different platform architecture.

What the evidence does not establish is equally important.

It does not establish that one unified gaming destination is inevitable.

It does not establish that publishers would abandon their own launchers.

It does not establish that shared infrastructure always beats vertical integration.

It does not establish that Xbox hardware would necessarily gain market share under a board architecture.

It does not establish that players migrating from console to PC systematically choose Steam despite having larger Xbox libraries; that remains a plausible and testable migration hypothesis.

And it does not establish that Xbox Forever itself would be profitable.

Those remain hypotheses.

The value of the research is that they are now testable hypotheses rather than slogans.

This is where Xbox Forever becomes relevant.

Not as proof.

As one architectural response to the economic position described above.

Its opportunity would not be to own every game, every creator, every community, or every service.

Its opportunity would be to make those participants more valuable because they operate together.

A publisher could retain its identity.

A creator could retain its identity.

Discord could remain Discord.

A game could remain completely itself.

But the board could provide common systems underneath them:

identity,

continuity,

payments,

social presence,

discovery,

governance standards,

interoperability,

trust,

commerce,

and shared infrastructure.

The goal would not be to eliminate independent pieces.

It would be to make participation on the board more attractive than rebuilding the same platform layer separately.

That is a different competitive strategy.

Not:

Own the most pieces.

But:

Create the environment in which the most valuable pieces want to participate.

If that works, Xbox does not have to win every game.

It benefits when the games win.

It does not have to build every community.

It benefits when the communities become stronger.

It does not have to recreate every outside service.

It benefits if those services make participation in the environment more useful.

And Xbox hardware does not become less important.

It can become the most complete native expression of the board.

The best seat at the board does not have to be the only seat.

That creates a stronger relationship between platform and device:

the board makes Xbox hardware more differentiated,

while Xbox hardware gives the board a deeply integrated home.

The same board can extend across PC, cloud, mobile, handhelds, and future devices without making those devices strategically equivalent.

That is the leverage of the architecture.

The gaming industry has spent decades competing over pieces.

Hardware.

Exclusives.

Studios.

Subscriptions.

Storefronts.

Catalogs.

Those things matter.

They will continue to matter.

But there is another position available.

The environment around the pieces.

The place where identities persist.

Where relationships accumulate.

Where discovery happens.

Where commerce becomes easier.

Where independent products gain access to shared infrastructure.

Where communities carry value across activities.

Where hardware becomes more useful because of what surrounds it.

Where a player can move from one device to another without leaving their gaming life behind.

Where outside innovation can make the platform more useful without the platform having funded every innovation itself.

That position is not free.

It carries infrastructure costs.

Governance costs.

Safety costs.

Political costs.

Technical costs.

And enormous responsibility.

But if the architecture is sound, it creates a form of leverage unavailable to an ordinary product.

A product becomes more valuable when the product succeeds.

A board can become more valuable when everyone on it succeeds.

That is the distinction.