Pay Less If You're a Nice Person: Valve's Freemium Model For DOTA 2

Canazza writes "In a podcast interview with Seven Day Cooldown, summarized by Develop, Valve Boss Gabe Newell discusses the payment model for upcoming strategy game DOTA 2. 'The issue that we're struggling with quite a bit is something I've kind of talked about before, which is: how do you properly value people's contributions to a community? ... 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. ... “So, in practice, a really likable person in our community should get DOTA 2 for free, because of past behavior in Team Fortress 2. Now, a real jerk that annoys everyone, they can still play, but a game is full price and they have to pay an extra hundred dollars if they want voice.'"

Comments

More Importantly

[eldavojohn]

More importantly, why wouldn't the jerks just start new accounts and buy the game at the entry level pricing instead of the jerk pricing?

Might have the opposite effect?

[wamatt]

"Dude I paid $100 bucks to be a jerk. Did you? No then STFU asshole."

Re:I like this

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a DOTA noob that has spent a little time in the DOTA 2 beta.

This community is not noob friendly at all. DOTA is complicated, and there is *TONS* of stuff that there is no way a noob will know.

Yet it seems like 10 - 25% of the community is verbally abusive towards noobs.

This is a HUGE problem if Valve wants DOTA2 to be a successful game. New people need to be able to come in and learn the game without being abused by assholes that think they are better people because they do nothing but play DOTA.

If every new person quits the game after being yelled at, there won't be much of a "community" left.

Re:Freemium model necessarily attracts jerks...

[Luckyo]

I think it's less of an issue with monetization and more of an issue with DOTA format. I've played it in HoN, I played it in SC2 DOTA mods like SOLTS, I played it in LoL. They all suffer from the same problem in spite of being 3 different models. HoN was buy to play, SC2 was buy the main game, play custom games for free and LoL was free to play. LoL is not actually/technically freemium as paying customer doesn't get any gameplay advantages over someone playing for free.

DOTA format just makes people into assholes because someone making mistakes punishes the entire team in a very direct and visible manner. So people become assholes to the "feeders" very quickly, as they directly ruin their gameplay experience.

First Jerk to Fine:

[CanHasDIY]

Whoever posted this summary without spelling out exactly what DOTA is.

Second asshole to be fired from the cannon would be the article writer who did the same fucking thing.

Re:First Jerk to Fine:

[tepples]

Apparently "Defense of the Ancients" is a Warcraft III mod, and not everybody owns a copy of Warcraft III.

Re:First Jerk to Fine:

[Necroman]

DOTA = "Defense of the Ancients".

The basics of the game are that you control a single unit (a hero), and you work with a team of people (normally 5 other players). So it becomes a 6 vs 6 battle where you are trying to destroy the other teams base. This game style has been dubbed ARTS (action real time strategy).

  It originally started as a Warcraft 3 mod. Since then, numerous companies have copied the style.

1) You have Blizzard creating a DOTA mod for Starcraft 2.
2) You have Valve creating DOTA 2. (note that Valve and Blizzard are having a trademark war right now over DOTA). Dota 2 is a stand-alone game.
3) LoL (League of Legends) is a DOTA style came released back in 2009. It's a stand-alone game with persistant characters.

Re:Good Model

[N0Man74]

Basically, Valve is going to tell a paying customer that he is a jerk (indirectly by offering him a higher price than others). Great business model.

Next release, they can tell a paying customer if he is a moron or not - i.e. if a customer paid for a valve game even after being indirectly being told by Valve that he is a jerk, that means he is a moron.

I see nothing wrong with that, when a small number of unpleasant players can ruin the perception and experience of many people. I have quit subscription games in the past because of briefing and anti-social players. For them to tolerate jerks, just because they are paying customers, is shooting themselves in the foot a lot more than making a small number of people, who are ruining the game pay, extra.

Re:Maybe Valve should concentrate on other things.

[mistermocha]

Can't resist.... Maybe Valve should finally finish the Half-Life series

Re:Freemium model necessarily attracts jerks...

[Anubis IV]

It's not just freemium that attracts jerks. Free in general does.

Marco Arment, the developer of Instapaper, talks about his development process and business decisions relatively regularly, and I recall one of his posts regarding his decision to drop the free version of his app. If you scroll down to the "Undesirable customers" heading, you'll see some of his talk about the sorts of stuff he noticed as a trend between the free and paid versions of his app.

Though he doesn't out-and-out say it this way, his point is basically that people attracted to free are cheapskates who tend to have unreasonable demands and a sense of entitlement. I'm inclined to agree as well. Having people pay even a buck or two makes them much more invested and filters out a lot of the riffraff who you'd rather not be dealing with.

So, it's not just in games where you get undesirable types with a free-product business model.

Re:So

[VGPowerlord]

Yes, an furthermore $100 wasn't exactly a figure plucked out of the air... it's the cost of the "Something Special for Someone Special" item in the TF2 store, which when purchased, sends out a message to all players currently playing TF2 that "[Person A] has given a [Renamed Thing] to [Person B]. Congratulations!"

Needless to say, this item is used by jerks with various messages. For $100 a pop.

Did I mention the item's other use is a barely-visible cosmetic item in the game?

Re:I like this

[Anonymous Coward]

By far the biggest tragedy is that it's obvious that you actually believe the things you're saying. One can only hope that some day you'll get a glimpse of reality.

Re:I like this

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. The terrible thing here is not that he behaves like this, but that he fails to realize that theses are not, as they are in his mind, the kind of behaviors that anyone desires, respects, or tolerates. It's like a criminal telling the judge at trial that if anything he should be paid for committing crimes because he's actually doing society a favor.

Re:I like this

[Vintermann]

I actually prefer to talk to, and be surrounded by, people who are assholes. I think they're more fun, and I couldn't give less of a fuck about being insulted by some random dipshit on the internet.

Well, fuck you and what you want, freak.

Re:I like this

[19thNervousBreakdown]

Each player could start out with their "Protection from assholes" flag set by default. If they either behave abusively (according to whatever flawed metric Valve uses to make that call) or turn the flag off intentionally, they will lose the ability to communicate with people who still have the flag set.

See, now that sounds fine to me. I'd turn that flag off and happily exclude myself from the milquetoast masses. The very first thing I do anywhere it's available is turn off the profanity filter, and turn on the PvP flag.

I'm not out to actually ruin anyone's day. Hell, I don't even want to make dipshits like the post above yours feel bad just because they can't tell the difference between a troll and somebody who prefers a more honest interaction style between their peers. I just want to call you a fucking moron when you do something stupid and have you be mildly embarrassed and have that mild embarrassment be a motivator to fix your behavior in the future instead of going, "uh, gee, golly gosh, you know it's actually more effective..." and then have somebody mash "UNLIKEABLE" because I didn't make them feel like a perfect snowflake.

And I want the same thing back. I don't want language couched in fifteen layers of inoffensiveness, just tell me what I did wrong, feel free to throw a curse or two in for emphasis if you think it's warranted. I'll sort out if I'm actually a dipshit on my own.

Re:Freemium model necessarily attracts jerks...

[skine]

So obviously we should make /. a fee-based service.