Earlier this month, Joe started a campaign to fly Gabe Newell and Erik Johnson out to Australia to take a look at his upcoming Left 4 Dead campaign after Gabe jokingly told Joe he was boycotting his mod.
Joe quickly started fundraising, and as of yesterday managed to raise $3,121.27 -- more than enough to cover two round-trip flights from the US to Australia. It's happening. Valve let us know today that Gabe and Erik are, in fact, traveling to Sydney, and will be meeting with Joe on October 7th.
The best part of the story, and a part Valve didn't even mention in their PR (which I think is pretty classy), is that Valve had Joe donate all the money he raised to Child's Play. Valve will be covering the cost of the plane flight themselves, Joe gets to meet Gabe and Erik, and $3,121.27 is going to a great cause. Everyone wins!
If you're in the Sydney area, keep an eye out on Joe's blog, because the meeting should be open to the public. If you've always wanted to hang out with Gabe and you're Australian, this is your big chance.
Jonathan Ross is an Associate Editor in Los Angeles who is obsessed with capybaras. Like, seriously, obsessed. If he's not playing Team Fortress 2 or getting into arguments about why PC gaming is superior, he's either off having a fancy dinner with lots of expensive wine, or sitting on the Destructoid IRC complaining that's he's not off having a fancy dinner.
Likes: Chrono Trigger, Street Fighter, Steam, everything Blizzard and Valve have ever made, playing Angry Birds on the toilet.
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Contest:
6:20 PM on 10.01.2009
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FFFFUUUUUUUUUUU-
Lucky... My ignorant Americandom will not allow me to travel to any foreign country with more than 5 letters in it... Stupid Recession... I guess I can't meet Victoria's Secret's 2nd Place Supermodel... Gabe Newell!
XDXDXDXDXD
ssnirkk.
They like making money quite a bit. Look at the statistics of all previous sales, they have an massive influx of purchases.
By distributing it on steam, they cut out the Middleman... which means that Valve directly controls the prices, keeping it as cheap as they want...
Likewise, since they own the game, they can clone it as much as they want, and distribute it through their servers. So technically, even if they sell Left4Dead for 1$ now, they're still making money...
Once they pay off the costs of developing the game (which I'm pretty sure happened within the month it came out), they begin making money. Since they don't need to make disks, since its on sale through Steam, Valve saves more, and earns more money. How capitalistic...
I know, I'm such an ignorant American... =P
@ Nogarda: Yeah... Gabe's charity thing, low prices on Steam, free DLC for PC users... Valve's trying for sainthood...
Except with all of these, they're still making money.
With steam, there are no returns, or "trade-ins", so every copy sold they make money off of... and they have infinite copies. Low prices in general just make the consumer purchase more games (like me), causing Valve to make huge profit... it doesn't cost much to distribute their games. And sales cause the same result. Free DLC? While it requires more work, and pay for developers, they still cause more users to buy the game, or even open steam, forcing the users to see their adverts, earning money... and selling more games. And the charity thing? While it seems good... Valve may be doing it just for publicity. Gabe may want to change his perceived image from the Victoria Secret Hacking, or just to cause good publicity for Valve in general...
Valve may be saints... but they're rich saints with good marketing.
Because, god forbid they make money. Because then with that money, they would buy the tickets and give the rest to charity instead. And that would be terrible.
Just kidding, but seriously, they deserve the money. They have great deals and great games, what's not to love?
On topic, this is really awesome of Valve to do, both actually going to Australia and making Joe give the money to charity. I hope they like what they see, maybe he'll get it as DLC for L4D2. That would be sick, considering us 360 owners can see any of that mod love.
Anyone got a link to anything on this campaign? Is it actually any good?
I'm not at all saying they shouldn't make money... I'm not communist! XD
I'm just saying that they always manage to find the right way to make themself known, increase marketing, and make the players happy all at the same time.
*Applause*