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Valve's Newell: One-Price-For-Everyone Business Model 'Broken'
Fysx writes with recent comments from Valve co-founder Gabe Newell about how he thinks the traditional video game business model is flawed:
"The industry has this broken model, which is one price for everyone. That’s actually a bug, and it’s something that we want to solve through our philosophy of how we create entertainment products. What you really want to do is create the optimal pricing service for each customer and see what’s best for them. We need to give customers, all of them, a robust set of options regarding how they pay for their content. An example is – and this is something as an industry we should be doing better – is charging customers based on how much fun they are to play with. Some people, when they join a server, a ton of people will run with them. Other people, when they join a server, will cause others to leave. We should have a way of capturing that. We should have a way of rewarding the people who are good for our community."
Steam is usually the gaming conglomerate that's most often mentioned on /. . (I only bother to play the free games in the Ubuntu repository.)
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
This sounds like total crap. If I "make friends" with more people, then I'll be charged less a month? Then some 13 year old will figure out a way to make a buck off a guide called "Geek to Everyone's Friend in 7 days" which will make him very popular with his other geek friends, and change the face of gaming as we know it.
Guess karma has a price.
This seems pretty flawed itself because it basically punishes players for having greater skill. The main reason people leave a server on a source game is because the battle seems impossible. This is the worst idea I've ever heard, and it will turn away some of the best players. Inequality is important, it gives newer players something to aspire toward.
Tell people how low your price can possibly go, but have a plan to charge many times that amount. Good players can receive countless discounts, trolls and griefers would be well advised to take their bile elsewhere if they want to continue qualifying for said discounts.
I think insurance companies suck, by the way.
Some people, when they join a server, a ton of people will run with them. Other people, when they join a server, will cause others to leave.
In other words, now, instead of having a bunch of friends harass you because they want to build a bigger farm, your friends will actually get monetary recompense for harassing you. Looks like I'll have to unfriend even more 'friends'
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
That's a nice idea.
However, it's a business. It has shareholders. It's objective is not to achieve the optimal price for the players--the optimal price for the players is that which maximizes the ratio between enjoyability and cost. The optimal price for the business is that which maximizes profit. (I suppose the present value of all future profit.)
Players who are fun to play with generate revenue for the business by making it more fun to play, and that can be captured. And it may be that optimizing community relations has some value to the corporation as well--paying good players might be a marketing expenditure.
Generally, the idea is to charge based on the amount someone is willing to pay, and not sell to people who can't at least meet the costs of maintaining the system unless the cost can be born by advertisers. The question is how to determine what people are willing to pay.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
I completely agree that customers who buy a lot of games and who are clearly of the higher income bracket should pay a bit more for games and entertainment. I would support this idea, as it would probably cut down on piracy. Most of us don't mind paying something, but if we are college students or struggling to find a job we simply cannot afford $50-60 a game.
Trying to make money from something that isn't scarce is silly. Charge for the scarce goods not the stuff you can easily copy. The very first copy is scarce. Support is scarce. Commissioning people with talent is scarce.
One issue might be the inevitable sense of entitlement that purchasing chat type services in-game might create. That could open a whole new can of behavioral worms.
Adobe charge one price in the US, and 3x to 5x that price outside the US. [grr] crooks [/grr]. One price levels the playing field.
MicroDaft worked the other way - full price USA, and heavily discounted in high-copy-theft countries to try and discourage illegit copies. Cuts both ways I guess.
They want to turn everything in life into a popularity contest. Do we really want "Girl gamer" types to get their games free, because they giggle over a mic and flirt with desperate nerds?
I'm tired and bored and don't want to play with the cheating 16 year olds with their modded game clients anymore thanks.
The money can be given to you via a government jobs program. Build a bridge and then spend the money on games in the evening.
I can see it now, a newbie joins a game server, with 15 other players. They play the current FPS game, but are not very good.
After a couple of hours, they see this message from the game system:
"15 out of 15 other players have rated you as: Loser. That will cost you $30 in penalties. Your credit card has been charged."
Since the other players were rated higher, some of that money goes to lower their game playing costs.
Somehow, one price for all, seems more fair.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." Albert Einstein
What a bunch of management wank-speak that is.
I love Valve, they support their games and reward the gamers in brilliant ways, but this is one of the stupidest ideas I've heard of in a long time.
Microsoft Sells the Same Product at several price points. So you get copies of "Only to be sold with a new Computer software" floating around. And Student Office at 1/3 the price of Business Office. Even Hardware companies have to fight the importation of products sold cheaper in other counties.
Prescription Drugs, in the U.S. you can drive to Canada and get a lower price.
Every Business want to get the maximum you can afford to pay. Most have to settle for what the market will bear. It is called capitalism.
Otherwise it will just create a new scam where you try to convince them you are in the lower cost group.
It seems to me that Mr. Newell has lost his way similar to MIT engineering graduates that work for Wall Street. We know that it is broken, and we know that you can do it better then them. But I'd rather play better games (i.e., HL3) then play shitty games cheap.
What started as the Team Fortress 2 nonsense store which allowed the purchasing of hats in a first person shooter(!), has progressed to a total overhaul of how Valve sell their products. Portal 2 is now fast becoming the flagship example, with, wiat for it, hats available for purchase, along with little flags and such. DLC (I feel a bit sick every time I say or type that) is the devil that you cant' avoid. If Activision put a human shit in a box and sold it as Call of Duty (or Modern Warfare, whichever they own) material DLC, for let's say £5 / $9, it's guaranteed they would make a profit. Call of Duty: Human Chemical Warfare in a Box.
Pretty much every game you buy now has this so called downloadable content, right from the game's release. There's no relevant analogy here, even the most coherent slashdot analogy wouldn't be able to ascribe to the bizarre concept of selling an entertainment product with parts loped off and sold along side it.
A great example is the add-on content to Railworks 2. A £25 game with £800(sic) of DLC. Have a look if you don't believe me. http://store.steampowered.com/app/24010/
Bottom line, there's a huge amount of money to be made on the DLC market and any game company would be stupid not to dip into that pool. And it's a damned shame.
If those fake accounts need to spend real money (buy in at retail price) to count, that's not such a likely scenario.
Nowadays, "government jobs program" sounds like he's pulling one over on someone if he's making enough for a game. Anything short of being paid sub-minimum wage on a contract basis for undergoing medical experimentation or other things valuable to the shareholders and other early resource adopters is socialist -- in the Network News sense.
This makes no sense until you start breaking down the components of the game. I don't play online multiplayer, so don't charge me for it. But I might be interested in playing, say, the Portal 2 Co-Op modes, so maybe I'll buy it for this game and not for others. Break *that* one-price-for-everyone model down, and I'd be interested.
I initially wrote this off as "oh he's sort of trying to implement perfect price discrimination", which is great in theory, impossible in practice.
But if you ignore his "one price for everyone is a bug" idea, which is fucking stupid. Then supplant it with a, you get micro payments over time, to your account, for playing a lot and being a good player. Then it's just "incentivise people to play nice". That would mean some sort of mechanism of ranking players (based on fun), and giving them targeted discounts based on new games.
This seems fine and dandy... in theory. Once again, how would such a mechanism be implemented? Admin's would suddenly have a lot of power, or other players would, where they could actually do monetary damage to someone. You'd need a dispute resolution system, which is going to cost you overhead. Suddenly you've invented an elaborate system, which might make less profit, and the inventive structure might deter people from getting into these games because "well if I'm not good at it, I might end up paying more for other games I'm more interested in/better at".
At which point, you realize BOTH of these ideas, and likely everything this man has ever said, everything his grandparents ever said, and that his spawn will ever say, is wrong!
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
The fake accounts can always use bogus credit cards. Yes, it seems like money coming in, but a lot of that will be yanked back out when charge-backs start occurring, or people wonder why they got double-billed.
One reason why gold spammers on MMOs are common is that when people hand the sleazier ones their credit cards, the cards are charged multiple times, usually to provide 1-2 extra accounts ready for botting. Now multiply that by how many people on a MMO pay for gold. It is easy to understand that even though a MMO company may swing the banhammer like a lawnmower like in Dead Alive, it doesn't seem to have that much effect.
If a botter decides to make all their bots put in a complaint about someone, most GMs seeing that pop up will almost certainly boot if not suspend the victim's account just to see what is up.
If my wife didn't watch TV, i'd stop subscribing tommorow, so I hear you loud and clear.
:)
Cable companies could make more money if they could just become repositories for programming on demand for everything. So basically they become one giant PVR - and charge per episode or per season for programming - of course, advertisers would want them to force ads, but if I had enough money to start it up, id offer a full streaming on demand service - one subsidized by on screen ads while you were watching programming and one where you paid to have no ads.
Then if I wanted no ads on a series of programming, for 20 episodes I'd pay like $20.00 for the season, and would have a month to view it. If I wanted to do single episodes, then i'd charge $2 per episode for instance. The thing is, like being in a restaurant - it's all about the selection, and if the selection is good and what people want, they will gladly pay through the nose for it.
Fantasy I know, but I can dream
So lemme get this straight, Mister Newell: you wanna charge socially awkward and inept people, like loners and people with Asperger's Syndrome, a premium simply because they don't benefit your Bottom Line above and beyond what they pay for the game? You want to penalize them for being "unpopular"?
Wow, as if they didn't get enough of that mistreatment in high school, now they have to endure it in the marketplace.
The experiment broke down immediately. Prices skewed so high on some weapons that they were literally unattainable. People coded and loaded servers full of bots to do nothing but buy weapons and further fuck with the algorithm. People figured out how to turn it off and voted with their feet.
The funniest thing about this whole 'give bennies to 'good' players' thing is? When they did it in TF2, with the halo hat for not having hacked or botted one's way through the achievements, wearing the thing just became another tool in the griefer arsenal. Likewise the Mac edition earbuds, and the weapons for pre-ordering RIFT, and anything else of the like that comes down the pipe.
Just think about it: People are getting their undies bunched in droves over a few polygons and some limited special effects. Imagine what they'll do when there's actual money on the line.
"The problem"?
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Valve does Gods work imho so I would not dismiss this out of turn. He is naturally talking about multiplayer games because in single player games you effectively pay for the content so your entire user experience is crafted by the company using artists etc so in that case you charge what it cost you to make and think up and then some. Now in multiplayer games, the community adds a significant portion of the value to the final product so it could be argued that it makes sense that they be rewarded for adding value to a product (not unlike modders who can sell their maps on the starcraft 2 map store thingie).
In an MMORPG you ARE rewarded for being a better community member when you join groups, raids etc allowing you to unlock better gear and levelup faster. This does not result in monetary gain but most mmo's have some kind of conversion between in game benefits and real world money (not gold farmers, more like purchasable experience scrolls and the like). So in some ways being a better community player already rewards you (at least in theory, by design). Should the base game be cheaper for better community members? I dont think so. Should being a team player/community positive give you in game rewards that are otherwise purchasable with RL cash? Yea that sounds decent.
Its vvvvvvvery interesting he mentions Dota 2 here. First because its good to hear some news about it cos I am waiting on it, and secondly because DotA (the original wc3) has a community that WILL bite your head off the instant you make a mistake in game or say something stupid in people. For some reason DotA brings out the worst in people.
Internet's Vectormatic: Gabe Newell's brain broken.
I dont care about online MP these days, but if this even so much as creeps near Valve's single player titles they can fuck off, i like my games single player and without influence from random internet people thank you very much, that includes the price
People, what a bunch of bastards
Large man seen on water ski's above shark infested waters.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Happiness is mandatory, friend citizen.
So now, on top of accusation of hacking, people will suspect each other in trying to get freebies from game company by pretending to drag in more customers.
And I thought, atmosphere in some... communities could not get any more poisonous.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
you will reward those that game the game and punish those that play it.
Because what do you think will happen? Trolls don't play games but they toy with it. Handing them yet another toy to abuse and screw with isn't going to make it better.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Basically. Gabe invented what bar owners have known for centuries.
Gabe, Gabe, Gabe. You love talking about this hypothetical shit, but you somehow can't bring yourself to answer even the smallest questions people ask about Episode 3 (or Half Life 3 if you believe the rumors).
Shut the fuck up and get your developers coding already. You can't end Episode 2 like that and not have a resolution.
Yes I'm pissed off. Maybe irrationally, but this guy's been spouting a lot of crap recently (how games need to be more social, connected to Facebook and so on) that I'm wishing for someone with more traditional views on gaming to gain prominence.
I totally agree with Gabe on game pricing, when the pricing we are talking about is how much the gamer pays, with the price varying based on the market they reside in. For example, a gamer in China or a developing nation should be able to pay less for a game than someone from EU or the USA. The average salary in emerging markets does not allow for paying the same price as we do in the EU or USA (or Korea, Japan, etc.). I believe this is a major driving factor behind game and software piracy in these countries. The average consumer just can't afford to pay what we can, and so they pirate the game. It has been shown time and again, if you offer something at a reasonable and fair price, more often than not people will pay for it. When the price of something you really want is out of reach and easy to get by illegal means with little risk, then piracy happens. The challenge of this is if you offer products for a lower price in specific markets, how do you prevent the lower-cost version of the product from being sold in a market where the price is higher? Steam seems to handle this pretty well, but it's still a potential issue.
However, I totally disagree with Gabe on his server/online pricing scheme. This is just creating a way for people to literally "game" the system for profit. You are incentivizing bad behavior whenever you put a price tag on something that someone can manipulate based on their actions. Online gaming will become less about playing the game itself and more about how to game it for profit (or lower cost). This will ruin online gaming and it will not work.
so now you can get a group of kids that want to monopolize part of the server that all say each other are fun and anyone else is terrible. they do this already but now the difference is going to be that there will be consequences for everyone they screw oever
there go the profits!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Yes, the fact that you are on a flight from O'Hare to SFO and paid $234 while the person ahead of you paid $428 and the person beside you paid $173...yeah, people will loooove that model brought to Steam.
SteamAir, coming in 2013....
I had to chuckle (in disgust) when I read this article. "The industry has this broken model, which is one price for everyone"? One price for everyone? What? Are you kidding me? I'm in Australia where we pay far, far more for games than in the US or Europe including online purchases and content. Perhaps they meant "one price for everyone..living in the USA". Regional pricing has been a reality from the beginning and continues today despite changes in currency values, distribution, consumer habits and the digital frontier (purchasing online). Any rational discussion about changes in the games industry's pricing models needs to start with a serious analysis of the (mostly flawed) pricing model which exists today, and demystification of this so-called "one price for everyone" falacy!
I don't really see this system working in casual, fast games like TF or CS, but a reputation system would definitely improve more "social" games like WoW.
I cancelled my subscription to WoW mainly because it's full of jerks and the GMs either have no power to act or have instructions not to act because Blizzard values the subscription money above all else. The only thing that would make me consider reactivating my WoW subscription would be a reputation system (think eBay; you'd get asked to rate the people you have played through a dungeon with at the end of that dungeon) with actual consequences (starting with in-game consequences, but I wouldn't be against reducing or even completely eliminating the monthly fee of players with high reputation).
Valve/Steam is already implementing a "one price per region and currency" approach : the number is the same for people paying in Euros and Dollars, just the currency changes, which means quite a difference in the actual price you pay, eg. Portal2, 49.99$ vs 49.99 euros (~70 US$ according to xe). I guess we europeans are not fun enough to play with.
"DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
And as we're talking about proper greedy companies and people who would sell their mother for a new monetization idea, I can expect the following:
1) For the exceptionally good/popular players, give some freebies indeed
2) For good/popular players, give in-game freebies (skins, pets, etc)
3) For bad/unpopular players, alter microtransactions so that they need to pay more or pay sth for functionality that was previously free
Point is, they're thinking to increase ways to monetize and charge more real money, and to keep the perceived balance, they will probably add rewards in worthless in-game currencies.
Not the price up front, but through rewards in the game. Slashdot's karma works in a similar way. Everyone can post, its equal in that sense, but people with more karma get more recognition. Multi-player games could have the same mechanism. Playing nicely with others could do things like making it easier to join another multi-player server, and would earn you in-game rewards more easily. Designing such a system that rewards positive behavior would be fiendishly difficult though. Also, a global ranking might not work....i might like playing with this person, but someone else might not....i might like playing with this person in this game, but not in another...
You find that people in online games quit for all sorts of bad reasons, including "That guy is better than me." I've seen that kind of thing in Bad Company 2, servers that get cleared out because people are good and nobody likes losing all the time.
I play BC2 with a small group of friends, all who are pretty good at it. We are all above average. Get a couple of us together on a server, and we tend to slant things to the side we are on. This often leads to lots of people leaving on the other side. Sometimes it leads to a server dying because people leave, the server switches people from our team, they don't wan to be on the other side so they leave and so on.
Even happens when we are facing another group who is playing together. That is most often the sort of game we get in, since that is where there are a lot of spots on one side. We'll get in and a group of people in the same clan are on the other side. We'll turn the tide of the battle and start winning, and they'll all leave because they want to beat up on people.
So should we get ranked down and charged more because we are good at the game? Now I should add we don't talk shit, we don't harass people, we just play the game to win. People leave because they like to win and aren't having fun losing. Should we get penalized for playing the game, as intended, and being good just because others are not as good and do not care to play against us?
If you look back you'll see Gabe Newell makes a lot of statements that are blue-sky future of gaming that tend to be insightful but aren't necessarily practical or profitable in practice. That being said he also knows that there's more to being right than simply thinking you're right and historically Valve have gone in completely different directions than they had originally intended because it was the *right* way to do things.
The one exception to this might be the whole 'hats' thing. It sure accomplished the goal of monetizing TF2 however it severely curtailed the main strength of the game, that being it's brilliant and uncluttered art design. Have you looked at any TF2 serverrs lately?
... This scarily reminds me of the swinery that regions are on DVD's
Allowing this for games would set a dangerous precedent for other products to follow... eventually you'll find yourself buying bread for twice the price of your neigbour because the 1k you earn more sets you in a higher income bracket
I wonder what'd happen with resale , too? I buy a game for 15 bucks and sell it to people for 20 for whom the company would sell it for 30? Meh, never mind, it'd probably be account-tied and OK with everyone since the law doesn't care much about making resale possible - see DRM
That said, i wouldn't mind there being rewards for skill , as in, a good player of one game earning credits to use to buy other games for achievements
I see a lot of cynicism here. Oh, he's trying to gouge us out of more money! He's discriminating against the nerdy! All my friends will be bugging me for more crap!
True and possible.
But remember: the man's job is to sell fun.
At the moment, you pay for fun at the game store, for which you receive a box. (Or, in this case, as a Steam digital download.) Whether this box will, after installing its contents, truly give you fun... is uncertain. And this uncertainly isn't cool.
So Valve is trying to establish a closer and stronger link between paying for fun, and getting it. Hence the micro-payments[1], the social networking stuff, and today's community-building musing by Gabe Newell.
Of course, there's got to be something in it for Valve too... and there is: happy gamers are more amenable to spending money.
---
[1] I'm a fairly prolific TF2 player. The general vibe I get is, having to pay for items is distasteful, as is anybody who's obviously splashed the cash. And crates are spawn from hell. But some of the stuff is cool, a lot of money gets kicked back to the community (see TFA), and the actual gameplay is as good as it's ever been.
First I was thinking that wow this person understands that not everybody has same amount of money but no, he is talking about maximizing profit and manipulating our natural behaviour. I will be more happy when running around and charge from my credid card will be made after every kill I make, or maybe it is not made if I shoot the right person.
This is grand coming from steam, where at least 9/10 games I look into are more expensive by far usually, compared to buying online from amazon, play etc. So no middlemen, taking a cut, no storage costs, postage and packing costs, plus the retailers cut to be made, and they still charge a bucketload more for the same game.
e.g. Rift on steam - £29.99, currently selling for ~£22 online (I saw it going for £16.85 for a while brand new)
Left 4 Dead - bought for £9.99 on amazon ages ago when it was still £19.99 on Steam, currently £14.99
I could go on but you get the idea...
And these greedy feckers are still looking for ways to milk the zombie gaming public for even more. Don't buy off steam people! Hunt down bargains and avoid giving these greedy feckers full price (or your credit card details - how long til they get PSN'd?) for their overpriced DRM'd data bits.
10$ for USA, 10€ for EU - super fucking equal price, innit?
Did you notice? All he cares about is multiplayer FPS crap. If you want an enjoyable single player experience (which is hard to find as it is), go shop somewhere else.
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
That's what he's trying to sell, but it's not what they're going to do. Valve couldn't measure karma even if they wanted to.
What's going to happen is you get a points for each game you are good (ie aren't bad) in. Big discounts won't be given to people who are really good, but rather people who own a lot of games.
In other words; you can tell Valve is trying to sell you a turd when they start advertising how shiny it is.
This is where I have a real problem with the 21st century version of capitalism.
Through peer pressure & succumbing to advertising, too many consumers have lost their minds & backbones these days - I actually think it is quite a "sick" society we have when people are prepared to queue overnight for a new gadget or game, especially when in other parts of the world people queue for food in order to avoid starvation.
I don't have a problem with wealth, I don't do so badly myself, but it's clear that in these times of governmental budget cuts, increasing fuel, food & utility prices, & job losses, there is still plenty of disposable income about when people are happy to shell out high prices for stuff, and stand in line for it. To me, this sends a very bad message to governments & corporations because it illustrates to them that there's clearly still a big pot of money that they can extract from Joe Public through even higher taxes & prices.
I'm a PC gamer, but a middle-aged one, & whilst I do have a nice amount of disposable income, I treat money with respect - ultimately, this means I have no credit card debt or loans, only a reasonable mortgage for a reasonably sized house that I own with the wife. Maybe once or twice a year, I will buy a PC game within a couple of weeks of release (I certainly won't queue for one!) but most of the time I just wait until the game is 1/10 price in a budget range, then buy it.
I simply *REFUSE* to bow to advertising pressure and hype - no tangible object is *THAT* important to me that I end up getting in a froth over it to the point where I *MUST* have it - one thing you learn when you get to my age is that the expectation is frequently the best part & actually having the object of desire in your very hands can be a letdown.
I like nice shiny stuff and spending money - but I decide when something is at a fair price, not some money-grabbing corporation.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I am willing to pay but only if you dont harass me with complicated schemes on signing up/getting rebates etc. If you want that people advertise for you, then hire them. If you want that people spread the word about your game on Facebook or at other places, then make a good game.
Stop trying to pay susceptible people off for the possibility to influence their reviews.
Since I don't play online games, I don't know what kind of mechanism(s) is/are in place for dealing with trolls and idiots. But I can see a group getting together to complain about someone that is too good or they just don't like to make him/her pay more to stay. Those more qualified can say whether this is a reasonable outcome or not. I can see other fail points in his scheme. In a perfect world, this sounds like a great idea.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
STEAM world pricing.
USA: $59.99
Eastern bloc countries: €59.99
Fuck you, Valve,
I have a choice between paying 40% more than americans or not paying at all. Guess which one I choose.
I'm all open for honest exchange, but I have no qualms against screwing you if you try to screw me.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Something you may be aware of is the increase in popularity in gaming over the past several decades.
That translates into more households with more than one gamer, and more households with more than one gaming generation.
I game, my kids game, I have many friends whose partner games.
As an individual steam user, I find your prices generally reasonable, your service adds enough value (ignoring ethics and judging strictly from a convenience perspective) to justify paying you and using it over the hassles of both piracy and retail. Good job to you and your team on getting (me) there.
However, I, like many geeks of my generation, have now evolved into a family of five, and am no longer an individual steam user.
This is where the problems start, and you push me, your customer, away. Why? Because I'm a dad, and my gang all play.
For the sake of making a point, I will ignore 'offline mode' because the games we care about are online.
Here are the options you give me:
Option 1. Have one steam account per person, and either buy many copies of each title
(or, I am told, go through a cumbersome process that costs 10$ processing fee to have your support move the title between accounts, this option is too painful to be practical. ).
Insisting I have a separate per-game license for each kid makes sense and is fair if we will be playing concurrently (and it is A-OK for you to sell us a 'borderlands 4-pack'. I'll buy it.).
This makes no sense if I'm done playing a game, uninstall it, and my kid wants to have a go. Realistically, you're dreaming if you think you'll get me to pay twice. You'll either give me a way to let my kid use it, or I'll take my business elsewhere to GOG or direct2drive or retail, because they will.
Option 2. Have one account for what I'll tell you is /me/, but what in reality will be the whole family. I won't tell, you won't know. Sadly, that means that two computers on my home network can't be "on steam" at the same time, and I can't play online game X while my kid plays online game Y. Plus, it'll get all my steam achievements gunked up with my kid's ones. I don't want that. Force me down this route and, again, I'll go.
Option 3. I'll create a separate steam account for every game I purchase. This will make your product into a very inconvenient one with a flaky user experience, no achievement history etc, and I'll take my business elsewhere. Too much hassle.
Here's the news. An entire gaming generation is now very busy having their children reach gaming age.
You can put some weight behind those brave words you said. The solution is dead obvious.
The recipe is:
1. One family "billing account" (that's a BILLING account, not an application account you sign into steam with) with a single billing method. If a single billing method isn't enough to deter most of the unrelated people from pooling into a "pretend family" account and costing you potential revenue (it probably would be enough, and while you may lose a bit of immediate revenue, you will make huge gains in customer loyalty by trusting them), then put your thinking cap on and figure out how to structure a plan to include real families that count money together and exclude most of the freeloaders. You have smart people working for you.
2. ONE family-wide game/license library.
3. Several "gamer" steam accounts, one per real person managed by the billing contact (the guy with the credit card who vets the games, aka the parent), without needing to involve you. That's what web interfaces (or your application) are for. These steam accounts should all be able to go online concurrently, and can all have their own (SEPARATE) steam achievements, and can be use different games at the same time. If they want multiple people to be playing the same game at the same time (that thing we call co-op play is very popular in families btw) they need to purchase and own multiple licenses. Keep 2-pack, 3-pack and 4-pack deals coming.
Yes, this will mean you may have sev
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I'd love to have the sort of bug where it actually was one price for everyone, but Gabe might need a reality check on that one - Australians (and presumably some other countries) are still getting skinned alive on video game prices - even on Steam.
We've started putting together a pricing comparison page for users and have a preview online, but in Australia we get to pay almost $50 more in some cases for games.
In Valve's defence, it isn't their fault - regionalised pricing is set by the jerk publishers. But lots of Aussie gamers are sick of it and we're spending more and more time and effort buying overseas where we can - but then we run the risk of falling afoul of the various mechanisms in place to specifically stop us doing that. (I've heard of at least one Aussie who bought a game after VPNing to the US to get the good price, then Valve took it away from him - not sure how true that story is.)
10 years ago Amazon tried providing differentiated pricing for different customers under the same premise: they would charge based on what the customer is willing to pay. It was a catastrophe. Angry customers would complain that their loyalty was being punished by higher prices.
Unfortunately, this happens to be one of those ideas that look good on paper but are bad in practice. A much better system than paying $60 for each game is basically letting the free market decide - this is the current model Amazon and other retailers employ. They have sophisticated algorithms to ensure maximum profits for the retailers and take in consideration the desires and moods of the masses. You might think that these algorithms would ensure "maximum rip offs", but at the end it creates the generally "fair" prices that many popular internet retailers charge.
It's Valve being retarded, and I kinda wish Valve would fuck off with their ideas as to how best to screw the customer out of ever more money without having to put any more effort in to produce great content themselves.
Valve were the ones who evangelised about how awesome episodic content would be despite people here and everywhere telling them it was a retarded idea. Then they and other companies went ahead with it, SiN episodes demonstrated the problem perfectly as the company went bust after episode 1 leaving players with half a game. Valve have aptly demonstrated they themselves can't make it work with Half-Life 2's episodes, which take as long to develop as full games, yet still have less content. This is of course between them bringing in regional pricing which doubled the cost of Steam games for some users, and the fact they peddle some of the most restrictive and often flawed DRM in the industry (Defcon regularly resorts to trial mode for me despite having paid for it via Steam to give one example).
But despite all Valve's ideas, they still take about 5 times as long to release a game as their competitors, and whilst they're games are good, they're not so good that the increase in release time can be justified.
Really, Valve just need to learn how to develop games better, they've always been over budget and very very late. Rather than getting the consumer to pay for their inability to run game development projects properly they should sort their company out.
If Activision can chuck out a Call of Duty each year which massively outsells anything Valve produces then there's really little excuse for them taking so long to just release a single episode for HL2- 4 years in the making already and seemingly no end in sight. Getting consumers to pay for their incompetence in new and unusual ways just adds insult to injury.
Gabe said episodic content would be good for HL2 as it meant fans wouldn't have to wait 6 years for a full HL2, yet here we are 7 years later waiting for the final 3rd of the game anyway. If they can't even come close to getting that right, why would I care about them trying to milk even more money out of me for their ineptitude?
Does this mean that the business would be funded primarily by jerks?
This seems like it would have scary repercussions.
... using the currency of my choice, from the region of my choice. Steam does NOT currently have "one price for everyone". If it had, I'd be able to buy my games using the same dollar amounts as americans, which I can't.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
It is exactly as the airlines do. based on the moment that you buy the price is changed.
If you are a regular flyer you Might get discounts. If you are the fat person you HAVE to buy 2 seats. if you are a VIP you get a upgrade to businessclass, unless you got kicked out before because of being drunk.
However the downloaded game is not really a scare good like seats on a airplane. There are no last seats to sell, unles you count the limit in a MP game as a resource that is limited.
This would ruin Steam for me, I get people to curse me out and leave on a regular basis just by being better than them, in most of the Steam titles I play online. Why the hell should I care how much fun my enemy is having in an adversarial game? Want to win, be a better player. Even in co-op games, I've had people whine for minutes and occasionally even leave because they didn't like my playstyle (especially when they can't keep up). Never once used hacks or griefed, yet my prices would likely be at the maximum.
When I buy your game I am buying it to play, not to "be good for our community" or to make you more money. That's your problem, Gabe.
since i'll be pirating the games because you put in a fucked up system that rewards some people and punishes other based on obscure ideas such as "good & bad".
One of my fav quotes: "Good? Bad? I'm the guy with the gun." Ash - Armies of Darkness.
Be seeing you...
I dunno about that. Consider a world where the only people playing games *are* reviewers, and yet the gaming companies still consider it lucrative.
I'm not being sarcastic or cheeky when I say that the average opinion of art and entertainment today is about on a par with shit in a can, and that's for breakfast, not for installation in a museum.
Every day the stupidest, dumbest shit *ever* is showing up on (to paraphrase R.E.M.'s Stipe), "Cartoons, Radio, TV, Movies, Magazines", and all I hear is rave reviews, day in and day fucking out, for every, single, last, thing, published.
Obviously there are enough people, now, in the first world who are also interconnected enough and coercive enough to create communities capable of supporting every stupid piece of trash conceived of and marketed.
So, his plan isn't new, it's a description of the way things are already working. IMHO.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
The phone company had that time-of-day pricing (good that is gone -- Hi Mom, sorry it is 2 AM by you but it is 11 PM for me here in college, and um, I need some money). GM would slap a Buick badge on a Chevy, Ford a Lincoln badge on a Ford and charge money for the status consciousness, that is until Bimmers and Audis came in fashion, although an Audi is a Volkswagen with a different badge on it. Airlines, don't get me started, have this patchwork of fares. Some of this is to fill plane seats and recoup costs at off-peak times, other of this is to offer teasers of bargain fares and then stick it to you when you have to get some place on short notice.
Yes sir, to charge different customers different amounts on willingness to pay for pretty much the same thing has long been the Holy Grail of marketing, but besides the seeming unfairness of it, and to all of you Libertarians, part of success in business is your reputation, and from a utilitarian standpoint, it imposes all manner of inconvenience.
Yes, we have cheap air fares, but on balance I have a low opinion of airlines. Yes, you can negotiate a good deal on a car, but the thought that car dealers "size you up" and someone else is getting a lower price on the car gives me a low opinion of car dealers and the auto industry in general. Yes, you can stay on this side of the law when it comes to swindling customers and I suppose there is a Randian Objectivist rationale to do that, but as a society we are the poorer for it.
"How come that guy is getting a better price than me for the same thing?" People have built in subroutines for detecting inequalities in treatment. Sounds like a guaranteed way to make sure almost everyone is mad at you
- I've got bad karma because I won't parrot everyone else's opinion
Translation: we want to screw each customer for as much as posible, this requires and individual, rather than collective approach to pricing.
This kind of thing could get real ugly real fast. Its called discrimination.
In many online games, certain players can, lets say "detract" from other users gaming experience. Just like other gamers enhance some other gamers experience. Building in a model to promote one, and punish the other, seems like common sense, and can only make for better games.
However it would have to be done carefully, as it would be rife for exploitation. If some players want to go on and be total dicks, reducing others fun, well maybe they should pay more, and if others are helpful and positive increasing everyone's enjoyment, then they should likewise be rewarded.
This of course would only have to do with online games.
The problem is that people have fun playing with different types of people. For me, the underlying issue is that team-based games are frequently ruined by the constant issue of joining a team with a group of people who I'd rather be playing against than playing with.
Players rating other players based on fun is a good idea, IMHO. I'd rather they match teams based on such metrics (similar to how Netflix or Pandora decide what you may prefer in their offerrings), than to see a price incentive. Combining this with a system that matches teams for competitive play would help the fun factor immensely (particularly if you're an old fart like me with molasses reflexes).
Besides, Valve games, being episodic, have the price-to-fun ratio built in already to some extent (don't like it, don't buy the next episode). The initial cost is still prohibitive in some cases, and sale prices for old games help this somewhat (common on Steam).
So you find someone you hate through Facebook, etc... and their gamer tag. Go into every game they play for a few days, harass them until they leave. Now they are flagged "leaver" and lose freebies and unless you were suitably aggressive to EVERYONE in the room, you're clean.
No Valve. Just... No. The industry can't even get the simple idea of "Make a quality product at a reasonable price, give the customer what they want and they will buy". CD Projekt Red is understanding this with the GoG.com Witcher 2 release tomorrow - No DRM, all DLC free, true expansions, and LOTS of extras.
Valve I'm worried is losing their touch - between the overpriced hat mania and overpriced bot skins,I don't want to play those games for long periods of time. I have given up on TF2 completely - Shooter MMO (sans subscription, mind you. Now its even Free To Play, and pay $20 ONCE to be upgraded to a "premium account" - if you already bought the game, you're automatically "Elite". After that, you can buy boosters for double XP and monetary rewards, but the standard rate isn't bad either) Global Agenda lets me craft a new hat or pair of blades for free within the game engine, instead of paying real money for new items or grinding for days. The biggest problem with this latest idea is that the developer's model of "people who are good for the game" will NOT be the "Nice guys" this is aimed at.
Nice guys who make a server friendly for everyone are relatively common. People who are "Good for the game" is a relatively high metric, when it comes to convincing bottom-line marketdroids and business culture. Think of it like casino comps - the only people who are getting free suites are putting themselves in a place to dump a huge amount of money to the house.
As soon as business gets its grubby little paws on this ideas "Nice" will mean "Has Eleventy Billion Facebook Friends, which means if we give him a free game every fucking tweet or status message is free advertising for our game!" or "Creates OUR content for us, voluntarily. Like the hats - We'll pay them something to keep them giving the modeled items or mods for cash. If MrModder 10,000 gets an Elite sticker on the forums, $100 bucks, and free games why would he release his mods for free or spend time developing stuff we can't control" or the "Has an alt-gamer-BDSM-modeling-pseudo porn "Profile" webpage. Thousands of lonely nerds buy Shooter 2: The Shootening because she *giggles* and says she plays and she'd like to play with them. Giving her a free copy is a huge ROI"
BAD VALVE. VERY BAD.
Unless there's a non-exploitable way to reward friendly, if occasional players simply for playing, this is a bad idea. I cannot think of one - voting for "mentors" will degrade like it does to "Will Pay XXX for Mentoring". Flagging people is useless. Time spent is simply a grind and doesn't have a good metric for "productive, game-positive" benefits. Any thing else basically rewards people who are willing to do the dev/publisher's work, for what is a pittance compared to hiring someone to do it professionally. Can't be good. Just...can't.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination
On Eve, you can buy game subscription time using in-game credits. They're pretty expensive, but the idea is that if someone gets to a high level they must be good for the community, and should get to play for free.
For Steam, this could be changed to a Steam-based credit system. Maybe those silly achievements you get in many games could translate to discounts for other games, or some other measure of how fun someone is to play with.
The idea breaks down on two fronts:
- Meta-Gaming: Bots and hacks designed to boost your level, or make you look like a "fun" player would become more prevalent.
- New player penalties: To make up for lost profits to "fun" players, prices may need to go up to "bad" and "new" players. And if I can get a game for cheaper at GameStop than through Steam, why wouldn't I?
World of Warcraft is a perfect example. I know I WOULD pay extra if it for example meant that you had to be over 18 to join the server. With all the twelve year old retards running around in that game my willingness to pay would increase if they could promise to keep the worst filth out.
Restaurants do it all the time, comping dinners for celebrities to eat there and attract other full-pay diners.
Same with musical instrument-makers, giving their instruments away for free to big-time performers in hopes of 'free' advertising.
In other words, it is standard practice in the other genres of the entertainment industry.
we already live in a world where a dude from San Francisco can pay $10 for Portal 2 in Amazon, and another dude in Sidney will pay $108.
-Woof woof woof!
Riiiight. If Steam didn't have adequate fraud-protection measures, they'd *already* be having problems with illegitimate purchases -- the problem wouldn't be waiting for tools that analyze how users interact in multiplayer (tools which would provide all the more data to use in variance/cheat detection) to announce itself!
Charge all the market will bear and
There's one born every minute
Which is quite evident when people are comparing prices in the steam forums. Its one price for the US where they apparently are poor, and another easily 2 or 3 times that amount for Europe where they are apparently rich.
So how about the same price for all eh, you greedy capitalist?
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
That's all this ridiculous idea amounts to. Everybody starts out being a maximum asshole and being in the maximum asshole tax bracket. So for the sake of argument, lets' say a typical game sells for $20 now and Steam would be willing to go as low as $10 for an "excellent" customer. That means you start with a $10/game asshole tax. As you prove yourself to be less of an asshole, your asshole tax bracket does down until it reaches $0/game.
Don't even think about assuming everybody assuming everybody is not an asshole and increase their tax rate rate as their assholeness shines through. Sure it's easy to selectively reduce prices for a given segment of a market, but ever try to RAISE them? For something as subjective as being an asshole? After the PR uproar died down Steam would likely be running afoul of a few consumer protection groups/laws/agencies.
I'm not sure assuming that all of your customers are maximum assholes would be good for business. I wonder if Steam would require you to acknowledge that fact as well. Maybe a checkbox on their signup page: "I acknowledge I'm a maximum asshole and agree to be taxed as such until I prove otherwise".
But it could prove to be more fun than a barrel of monkeys in the customer service department:
(phone rings)
Steam CSR: Steam Customer Service. How may I assist you?
Irate Mother: My son Billy is being charged $18 for Hot New Game X while his friend Timmy only has to pay $13.
Steam CSR: It seems Timmy is less of an asshole than your son Billy.
Irate Mother: WHAT???
Steam CSR: Let me rephrase that: Billy is a much bigger asshole.
Irate Mother: LISTEN YOU! MY HUSBAND IS A LAWYER --
Steam CSR: Excuse me ma'am. You're an asshole as well. Billy now pays $20/game. Thank you for being a valued Steam customer.
(phone clicks)
It's all moot to me because Steam blows. I want to be able to buy software in physical form, bring it home, put it in my computer, install it, and have it work without any DRM or phoning the mothership. I don't want single player games that I buy to be trying to transmit network packets out of my computer. I'm not going to install the Steam client. I just want the game. Fortunately, there are plenty of great non-Steam games out there. I think I'll go buy another one this afternoon!
This is not a new idea. This harkens back to the old concept of "influencers and sheep" though. There's a reason certain people get free shit sent to them. It only makes sense for this practice to trickle down to "local influencers" within certain communities.
Economists are in love with the idea of price discrimination. They ignore the fact that it introduces a new cost and thus its own inefficiency; because people naturally want to avoid the effects of it and get the lowest price possible, price discrimination increases the cost of shopping. Look at the current situation with airfares, for example, where they can change literally by the minute; people spend lots of time trying to find lower fares, and that time spent looking for lower prices is (to borrow an economic term) a deadweight loss.
I suppose that if you really DID have perfect price discrimination, the discrimination would be unavoidable and so extra time spent shopping would be pointless. Your psych implant would figure out how much you're willing to pay, and that would be the price you would get no matter where you went. I don't think that world would be an improvement over one price for everyone; sorry, economists, it's just too Big Brother for me.