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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."
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."
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.
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.
Testing the cafeteria, maybe. What I'm trying to say is: Gabe is fat.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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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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
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."