Pay Less If You're a Nice Person: Valve's Freemium Model For DOTA 2 316
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.'"
More Importantly (Score:5, Insightful)
Gaming the system (Score:4, Insightful)
The real jerks will make sure they game whatever reporting tool there is in order to make other people look like jerks.
Re:I like this (Score:5, Insightful)
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... (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:5, Insightful)
Second asshole to be fired from the cannon would be the article writer who did the same fucking thing.
Re:Good Model (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Freemium model necessarily attracts jerks... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not just freemium that attracts jerks. Free in general does.
Marco Arment, the developer of Instapaper [instapaper.com], 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 [marco.org]. 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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, fuck you and what you want, freak.
Re:Freemium model necessarily attracts jerks... (Score:5, Insightful)
So obviously we should make /. a fee-based service.
Re:I like this (Score:3, Insightful)
On the other hand, I can't stand DOTA/DOTA2/LoL due to people smurfing and basically raping people who haven't the slightest clue to play the game. It keeps the community to a select assholes who have nothing better to do than troll newbies and talk shit. To use the car analogy (barely) - its like some professional driver challenging a newbie to a race on open track days, then talking shit to them for not being able to keep up.
Re:I like this (Score:3, Insightful)
I love this news. I'm going to organize a clan of jerks in DOTA 2. We will flag each other as nice players, and flag everyone else as jerks.
I can easily get 100 people to buy the game and follow me into this project, and with a bit of advertising on the webz I can easily get 1000 people. I'm sure we'll have no trouble becoming a majority of the playerbase or big enough at least that we can control the voting system.
Thanks Valve for making a game where us griefers can have fun. Meta-griefing is also the best griefing! Love you guys xoxox !!!!
Re:I like this (Score:4, Insightful)
If you talk to a real-life sociopath, you'll actually hear this from them, sometimes.
In a normal personal, the psychological gymnastics necessary to rationalize your behavior in this way would be truly amazing. In sociopaths, it seems to come naturally.
Re:I like this (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I like this (Score:2, Insightful)
The way I see it, if I take a tax credit for donating money to the Civic Opera (for which I get a nice seat at the opera), and then declare it on my income tax as a charitable donation to get the credit, that means some other poor schlub has to pick up part of my end of the bill for living in a nice society with running water and Internets and all the stuff that government is good for. I have noticed in my half-century, that the more money I make, the more I get to benefit from the Commons.
I live in a high tax city (Chicago) in a high tax state (Illinois) and I've got no beef about paying for it. I wouldn't have been able to do nearly as well if I'd lived somewhere like South Carolina, where taxes are low and they get more money from the federal government than they pay in taxes. I don't even mind paying a little extra so the people in South Carolina can pretend they're all about individual responsibility and put yellow ribbon decals on their cars and think they're patriotic because they kept the unions out. They need all the help they can get.