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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
Guess karma has a price.
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.
One zit-faced 13 year old gets to play for free, and that will "change the face of gaming as we know it?"
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.
They would also have to do away with their system for giving games to others or it would be easily abused.
It's very possible to define heuristics that create a rewards system for which the only way to game it would be to actually be nice to people. It's also equitable to do so. Don't be so skeptical.
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
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.
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.
This. The problem here is that the suggestion should not be expected to simply attract people who make the game more enjoyable, but rather the expected effect is that people try to become that more enjoyable person. The pricing algorithm actually changes people's behavior. You could end up with a lot of fairly shallow people.
At the risk of starting a videogames are/aren't the reason for social ills thread I'll say that the reward given for this shallowness could potentially be carried beyond the game and what started as an idea to pull in a fun community could damage the community in the game and society outside of the game. I doubt that the learned behavior of forced friendliness will be easily turned off in a real world setting. In some ways we do well at compartmentalizing things but I think that our social behaviors can't be easily isolated in the absence of a force that pressures them to be. For example, if I'm in the military I will learn to modify how I interact socially because there are consequences to not doing so. In this case there is a reward for being friendly, whether sincerely or artificially, in the game and no pressure in real life to turn that off.
I'm not a psychologist and the above is off the top of my head, but I think that it may be a good theory.
Yes, because the object of the game will cease to be capturing the dragons or whatever, and become trying to get the cheapest price/most cash refunded. This will usually involve doing things that aren't particularly useful to others but which it is possible to fool the system into thinking you are a 'fun guy to play with'.
This is basically what happened on /. with karma- for some people the object stopped being an interesting conversation and became karma whoring to increase their score.
Yeah, it's a wonderful pipe dream. An MMO where the worst scum of the playerbase get charged extra until they shape up or screw off would be a beautiful idea.
Pity it'll never happen. Any system can be gamed and any person you might want to penalize is the sort of person who will figure out how to game it. Unless you can code the game to recognize and punish bad player behaviour without introducing loopholes, and I don't see that as terribly likely.
Though you could introduce a "swear jar" feature easily enough, whereby using certain words in general chat on most servers would net you a fine, Demolition Man style. At a minimum, making the scumbags pay out the nose for yelling the word "fag" like Fred Phelps with Tourette's syndrome would be a thing of beauty. And perhaps a teabaggers fee for the FPS genre.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
In versus mode, AI director only runs once: and that's for the first team, the second team gets exactly what the first team got.
Feel free to mod me down, just know that unlike some Anonymous Cowards I'm not afraid to express my views as myself.
I wonder how this will affect all my single player games. Treat the NPCs well, and I get a discoount?
Valve would do well to remember that while the online games can be cash cows, they are also more risky and carry a much larger operating expense. It's the single player games that provide the slow secure income that allows you to do the social gaming. Reward those users, because they won't require additional expenses on your part after buying their games, and won't fill up your tech support with questions on port forwardings and complaints about latency.
Also, any system can be exploited. If done wrong, you will find a game/MMO where the griefers get free monthly costs, while anyone who isn't in the clique gets penalized as undesirable.
A system of assigning who is friend versus troll really only would work if it was manually done with one of the game employees doing the flagging as good versus troll. Even this can be abused.
If it were up to me, I'd see about notable community members getting a discount (or if they are good enough, such as one person on Everquest 2 Test who is the backbone of the server when it comes to tradeskills), hand them a permanent free sub because of their dedication. I wouldn't put in an automated mechanism just because people will find how it works and abuse it.
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.
Also, any system can be exploited. If done wrong, you will find a game/MMO where the griefers get free monthly costs, while anyone who isn't in the clique gets penalized as undesirable.
More evidence for my belief that all gaming threads degenerate into discussing EVE Online.
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.
Yes
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.
The problem is defining who is an asshole in terms a machine can understand and react to.
A heuristic system might work:
Points rack up if someone uses choice phrases (and variations of those replacing characters.)
Points rack up for bad syntax.
The game detects a lot of kills by someone near a spawn point (racking up points slowly, but surely)
etc.
The question is making this stuff work. Do points decay over time, or stay permanent, so after a while, after so many curse words, someone's account goes to the next tier of charges?
Of course, there is the civil liability of branded a griefer by the higher bill. Can a game company deal with a high-power law firm making a class-action libel case stating that the higher tier means someone is known as an asshole, thus causing reputation damage? I'm sure some law firm out there would be readying a motion of discovery in order to find something juicy along these lines.
If I were running a MMO, I'd concern myself with other things. Griefers can be handled by account suspensions, tarpits (if someone is spamming chat, each message is delayed longer and longer by the server. If someone is sending the same message, or similar except with a random value via /tells to people not guilded/grouped, their /tells start taking longer to be received, and the user eventually gets disconnected), and the usual MMO methods. I wouldn't bother paying for the devs to have a tiered payment mechanism. Instead, I'd have the GMs manually recognize the top notch players and give them free play.
It's the single player games that provide the slow secure income that allows you to do the social gaming. Reward those users, because they won't require additional expenses on your part after buying their games, and won't fill up your tech support with questions on port forwardings and complaints about latency.
They also don't pay anything after making their purchase. To be totally honest I don't think single player games have much of a future at the moment, except maybe as a hobbyist pastime. Which is a terrible pity.
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.
The problem is that the difference is largely not in the actual words that are being said. Good friends gaming often talk to each other in a way that would greatly piss them off if a stranger did.
So tempted to reply 'lol, linux rules', but will do so anonymously.
Happiness is mandatory, friend citizen.
Yeah, no one likes playing with you because you're awesome... that's it exactly. It must be.
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.
Well, except for the purchase of the "obligatory" additional 60 bucks worth of DLC's of course.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
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.
It might be simpler and operate on different basis. For example - valve gifted their entire catalogue of games to the participants of Portal 2 ARG who managed to get all 36 potatoes. They also cherry picked the 10 community leaders from the ARG and fly them over to Valve HQ and provided them with early access to portal 2. Essentially they created a bunch of torch bearers who will promote Valve in their respective communities. Another example could be a fan who e-mailed for an autograph and got disproportional response.
Got invited back to EVE online recently. Every time I think about returning I do a little bit of math, and remind myself that anyone willing to spend even a small amount of real-world money could easily buy themselves enough in-game currency to replace a ship like mine three times over. I consider it one of the critical flaws in EVE. Other MMOs may have to tolerate a little exchange on the black market of in-game advantage for real-world cash, but EVE is happy to endorse it so long as they get the money.
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 $173...yeah, people will loooove that model brought to Steam.
SteamAir, coming in 2013....
I had to chuckle (in disgust) when I read this article. "The industry has this broken model, which is one price for everyone"? One price for everyone? What? Are you kidding me? I'm in Australia where we pay far, far more for games than in the US or Europe including online purchases and content. Perhaps they meant "one price for everyone..living in the USA". Regional pricing has been a reality from the beginning and continues today despite changes in currency values, distribution, consumer habits and the digital frontier (purchasing online). Any rational discussion about changes in the games industry's pricing models needs to start with a serious analysis of the (mostly flawed) pricing model which exists today, and demystification of this so-called "one price for everyone" falacy!
Valve/Steam is already implementing a "one price per region and currency" approach : the number is the same for people paying in Euros and Dollars, just the currency changes, which means quite a difference in the actual price you pay, eg. Portal2, 49.99$ 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?
... 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
For say an MMO you could have a "Like" and "Dislike" button, and have a limit of times you can use it per day. And you might only be able to use it on people who have been on your own team/side ;). And you only see your score update after a week or so, or 30 dislikes/likes whichever comes first.
End of the month, the top X most liked might get a month's free play. The top Y most disliked might get monitored by staff (review interaction logs) to see if either they've been abusing T&C in ways that might get them banned, or the people who've been disliking them are the griefers.
That said if a griefer is going to set up 10 sock puppets and pay $$$ per puppet per month to "dislike" me, he's getting punished already ;).
Might not wish to implement the dislike button - because the problem is the noobs might get disliked to death ;).
It actually can be a lot easier to police certain virtual worlds than the real world, because you can log a lot of stuff.
Of course in some games, some people view the punishment as a reward: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usYzlP_9w_c&feature=related
One of the alliances in EVE - Red Something-Or-Other - is financed by a wealthy Russian dude. He basically just dropped $100,000 on PLEXes, CCP said "lol, okay", and he instantly crashed the PLEX market. You literally can buy your way into the game, and CCP is not remotely ashamed about it.
You can also play about 30 hours a month (once your skills are up) and make enough Isk to never have to pay for the game again. (Soloing Level 3s/4s, roughly 10 million an hour, and a PLEX is usually around 300,000,000 Isk.) CCP keeps the game relatively fair and balanced, and it's really a lot of fun if you have a good group.
Sadly, the most fun for me is in 0.0 but I'm not entirely fun of mandatory suicidal PvP missions every week. I just wanna mine and build stuff, man. That kinda killed the game for me.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
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.
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.
If I remember rightly, Valve said that they no longer intended to make purely single-player videogames at all.
qntm.org
STEAM world pricing.
USA: $59.99
Eastern bloc countries: €59.99
Fuck you, Valve,
I have a choice between paying 40% more than americans or not paying at all. Guess which one I choose.
I'm all open for honest exchange, but I have no qualms against screwing you if you try to screw me.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Just wait for the Game Of The Year Edition and get the whole lot for the same price (or less) as the original game was.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Something you may be aware of is the increase in popularity in gaming over the past several decades.
That translates into more households with more than one gamer, and more households with more than one gaming generation.
I game, my kids game, I have many friends whose partner games.
As an individual steam user, I find your prices generally reasonable, your service adds enough value (ignoring ethics and judging strictly from a convenience perspective) to justify paying you and using it over the hassles of both piracy and retail. Good job to you and your team on getting (me) there.
However, I, like many geeks of my generation, have now evolved into a family of five, and am no longer an individual steam user.
This is where the problems start, and you push me, your customer, away. Why? Because I'm a dad, and my gang all play.
For the sake of making a point, I will ignore 'offline mode' because the games we care about are online.
Here are the options you give me:
Option 1. Have one steam account per person, and either buy many copies of each title
(or, I am told, go through a cumbersome process that costs 10$ 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
-
The games industry now seems to be taking the stance that single-player gamers are a lower form of life to those that do all or most of their gaming online.
I love all the Valve games, I'm also playing and re-playing Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas with all manner of community mods. I do spend the occasional 1/2 hour online playing Warsow or World Of Padman but most of my gaming is single-player because I prefer to play when I want to, not when friends or online buddies need me to.
After pressure from friends, I tried WoW and managed to last the month of my original subscription before deciding it wasn't for me. I didn't find it any where near as immersive as single-player Fallout or S.T.A.L.K.E.R., I actually found it very unrealistic - e.g. waiting behind somebody on the same assassination mission as you until he kills his quarry, then the quarry comes to life again so you can go do the same thing.
I suspect that probably puts me in the category of "casual gamer" but in 30-odd years of doing it, I pretty much feel that all that *can* be done in single player gaming, with maybe the exception of mobile device games, has been done - so I can always go run an old game (with or without an emulator) that meets the requirements of what I need for gaming entertainment at that moment in time. Not forgetting all the free, Open Source and Indie games that are out there also.
Personally, I wouldn't worry too much about it - there's plenty of great single-player games out there to try.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
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.
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.
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
Yes, think eBay and i think abuses and corruption. Think Amazon, ditto. Slashdot, well we're largely above that but the moderation systems here can be abused, too. All these peer review systems have been circumvented, even countermanded by the users. More remote? Think Google-bombs. Horde behaviour would become the norm as people would prefer to fill a server up simultaneous to all their friends and just sit around showing off... I dunno, shooting a tin can in the air or rocket jumping, rather than actually play. Most of the FPS games Newell is fond of require sparse populations to maintain suspense and continuity, because the alternative is just a constant barrage of respawns in the middle of senseless humanflood. They could make bigger levels, but they would still get filled up, now with more impetus, by people looking for the lowest price. So it's ultimately a self-defeating scheme unless they are going to revolutionize how FPS war games work from the ground-up.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
That's an interesting thought at least in the MMO universe - what's to keep all the assholes and griefers from making their own group in order to self-sustain? Even in Valve's world of small discrete servers you could have 7 or 8 guys that are all on an external voice chat app that join a server and act like shitbirds in order to confuse the system.
Oh, and how do you not punish the guy who just happens to be really good, and people leave the server because they're tired of getting owned? I know I've left servers because a guy joined and completely unbalanced everything and made it less fun...
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
The only thing I remember about the hats was people getting all mad and promising to never play again when they had their hats removed as they cheated to get them.
Of course, you can't really trust those people to do what they say, there was an amusing blog post by this person I recall that was saying they would never play again. You look now, and that blog post disappeared and they've got loads of random TF2 references all over the place.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
All cool. The moderators never know where I'm actually coming from, so I have more positive karma than I know what to do with (seriously, it's good for WHAT, exactly?)
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
So don't buy their games. I stopped buying anything from them when they introduced Steam, and wrote to Gabe explaining why. I got a very polite response, basically saying that they knew that they would piss off a lot of customers, but they'd make a lot more happy, and that he was sorry that I was in the former category. Valve's happy with their customers, and I'm happy not being one of their customers.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Yes, that does mean I'm being consistently modded up for being trolltastically inflammatory...
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
Well regarding the group, you can probably design an algorithm to detect islands like that. For instance, languages like Actionscript 3 for Flash and C# contain garbage collecting algorithms that search for islands of self referencing data that seem to be detached from the rest of the program, and free up the memory they use. However it is absolutely not fool proof. About the one guy - I never understood why newer MMOs like WoW, Aion and Rift don't offer escalating bounty rewards on notorious PvPers. It would give the PvPers something to brag about, and when they are eventually utterly engulfed by angry players, a little closure for the little guys that got stomped. The trouble with MMOs is that they don't recognise ganking either positively or negatively, the devs instead apply blanket 'fixes' that can ruin the fun for people that just want to blow up a town for a while (e.g. Sergra at Crossroads back in vanilla WoW).
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.
The thing is that Valve games have polish. Its not just about how much content is in there, but how smoothly everything fits together. Portal 2, at least in single player, is an exceptionally well done game: zero-glitch high-immersion with voice acting and model animations that are top-notch.
The games are not only 'good', but are 'high quality' too. What other game house can say that?
"His name was James Damore."
Some of the nastier players already spend thousands to be better than everyone else. They have the ultimate weapons and transport. I've even witnessed a web-base MMO where one of the player actively canvased the dev team to create one off weapons for $1,000. They would have no problem paying for each swear word; it would be another ego-boosting feature.
"I have paid for my swear words. Hear me fucking roar"
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
Translation: we want to screw each customer for as much as posible, this requires and individual, rather than collective approach to pricing.
In versus mode, AI director only runs once: and that's for the first team, the second team gets exactly what the first team got.
In every map past the first, that gives the team that's losing a slight advantage, as the team that won the previous map plays the survivors first.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
If I remember rightly, Valve said that they no longer intended to make purely single-player videogames at all.
That is going to cost them dearly.
It's bad enough that nine out of ten games these days are console ports that don't play even half well on a PC, but if the games also have to make concessions to be playable by multiple people, there won't be many really great games any more, and entire genres would disappear.
Imagine a game like Thief with multiplayer.... *shudder*
What I learned from years of teaching, "The lesson taught is never the lesson learned". Good case in point, that will become a new rule of the game of playing the game. I have heard that commodity brokers when nothing is going on will bet with each other which elevator will come next. Gamers will game play,or the law of unintended consequences will reign supreme.
But this will create a new underclass, I'm not sure that is the intention, just to make more money, but underclass here we come, Like a credit score, will if follow you? will it affect other parts of your life?
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).
Just wait for the Game Of The Year Edition and get the whole lot for the same price (or less) as the original game was.
Except that won't come out unless someone buys the original run of the game.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
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
At which point, the winning move is not to play.
Though you could introduce a "swear jar" feature easily enough
As long as I don't get charged for talking about my "alfalfa-gorging sheep" (emphasis merely to highlight why the filter might pick it up).
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
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!
And perhaps a teabaggers fee for the FPS genre.
That seems a little uncalled for. I mean, i don't like the teabaggers any more than the next person (well, presuming the next person is sane at least) but charging people in a game based on their political affiliation doesn't really seem appropriate.
... oh, wait, we're talking about FPS games. You mean the _original_ kind of teabagger don't you? *headdesk*
(And yes, that really was the process my brain went through when i first read that.)
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
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
If you use phrases like "alfalfa gorging sheep" in everyday conversation, I think a virtual swear jar is the least of your concerns.
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)
Inequality is important, it gives newer players something to aspire toward.
Aspire to be a pasty, obese nerd?
I think you missed the moral of demolition man as it applies to your anecdote. The "advanced" society claimed that small steps such as outlawing swearing made everything safer, when really it just made everyone into greater noobs who were then ill prepared, evolutionarily, when real danger came.
The only way to fight trolls is to ignore them. Getting "creative" simply feeds into their troll games. This is a stupid idea from an increasingly ideologically dangerous developer. Makes me wish I didnt have hundreds of dollars worth of games locked up with them thats for sure.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
The ORIGINAL teabaggers were not FPS. The ones in FPS are just the ones that couldn't find anyone that was into it in real life.
This idea keeps sounding more and more like Farmville.
Valve is a "tremendously profitable" company. They don't owe anybody a game every x number of years. I personally love Steam and I only buy games through Steam.
Read my short stories - You won't regret it.
The problem of course is that as time goes on, you'll lose out by now capitulating. There are too many games these days being released which REQUIRE Steam even though they're sold at retail stores (Civ V, Black Ops, etc). If you think to yourself "that's OK - I'll just stick with the indie developers", that might not be enough since indie developers are often releasing games solely on Steam.
GOG.com and the Humble Bundles mitigate things somewhat, but it still does mean a significant reduction in what you can play if you choose to avoid Steam (and let's not factor pirated games into the mix, as that does not represent legal gaming). Ultimately you have to decide whether the positives outweigh the negatives. Given how cheap games often are on Steam (particularly with the sales), it tends to negate the inability to resell games so that makes things a bit easier. As for not truly owning the games - the world is full of compromises. Sometimes we have to.