Valve's Newell: One-Price-For-Everyone Business Model 'Broken' 374
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."
Re:| Dream (Score:5, Insightful)
oh no (Score:5, Insightful)
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'
No. (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Copyright and DRM are a bug. (Score:3, Insightful)
Newbie penalties (we need to be fair, right?) (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Re:| Dream (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:| Dream (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Copyright and DRM are a bug. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hrmmmm, interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Re:Fuck no (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes
Re:| Dream (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Curses be the socially inept! (Score:4, Insightful)
Victim complex much? He wants to charge more to the trolls and hackers. The sort of people that join a server and blare Rick Astley through voice chat nonstop. That's not going after the loners, that's going after the assholes.
Re:Curses be the socially inept! (Score:2, Insightful)
Get out of Mom's basement much? He effectively wants to penalize anyone who doesn't positively effect the social aspect of a game (and thus indirectly benefit Valve)... in other words, socially impaired people, not just "trolls" and "hackers". Newell never used those terms, you did. You don't seem to have a very useful definition of "socially impaired". Newell used a brush about as wide as "socially impaired", not as fine as "troll" or "hacker". There are plenty of ways a person can cause people to shun him that can't be described as either trolling or hacking.
I should know: As a volunteer for Designated Drivers, I made what I thought was an interesting constructive comment in a preliminary meeting. I was later asked by the director to please leave and not come back, because of that ONE comment. Other volunteers had complained about it and said they didn't want to partner with me, BECAUSE of that one comment. The comment was my mention of the numerous studies that have demonstrated that what we typically think of as "drunken" behavior is actually voluntary, allowed and enabled by social and cultural tolerance of that behavior when someone is presumed to be drunk. In other words, people behave that way after drinking alcohol because they know they'll be excused from it. It wasn't my judgement or opinion; I was merely stating a clinical fact. And for that people didn't want to be in the same car with me.
People that do or say innocent things like that will be swept up just as quickly in Newell's proposed dragnet.
Re:Copyright and DRM are a bug. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
I thought bottled water in places where clean water is plentiful for almost nothing would never take off. I was wrong. People aren't rational.
Gabe, go put your money where your mouth is (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:Gabe, go put your money where your mouth is (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree with all your criticisms. They're the reasons why if I have a choice between a steam only game and an xbox version of that game I'll get the xbox version so my wife and I can have separated achievements, progress, saves (in some cases), friends etc.
Your solution is a great one too. I'd love it if Valve introduced something like that.
Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)