Most of those days playing games i was doing the same, when ever boss buggered red alert 2 or Serious Sam 3d fps game over the old coax lan. Or after hours / weekend.
For the OP, there's a whole field of valuation methods based on discounted cash flow. If you do a little research on DCF valuation and how net present value works it will make sense in a macro sense. Note that in no way am I advocating for using DCF to determine if the market is priced correctly, it just broadly answers your underlying question if you understand how it works.
Twenty years ago was the height of the .com boom. The Semiconductor Manufacturing Index reflected on the fortunes of a significant percentage of the market by market cap because we were in a huge bubble of tech companies so they made up an outsized part of the total market's market cap. The .com crash happened, all that .com market cap disappeared and the relative impact of that index to the market as a whole declined significantly so it stopped having an outsized impact on the market. Just math really, no "powers" or any other crazy nefarious tinfoil hat BS, sorry.