Valve's Steam platform is pretty much the biggest player in digital distribution right now. They dominate the market in ways that get Randy Pitchford's underwear in knots. One of the reasons they stand on top of the pile is that they often sell to PC gamers in ways that makes piracy look like the less favorable option, as opposed to trying weird crackdowns that only inflame our wrath.
Another way they do it is by taking advantage of digital distribution's unique qualities, like with those ridiculous one-weekend Steam sales that offer kickass games for a song. Events like that get people really pumped up for a game, so much so that they often boost sales even after the product returns to full price. Jason Holtman, Valve's head of Steam (hee, that's a funny title) said as much speaking at the Montreal Game Summit.
"In a connected world with a connected game it's very different and it bucks some of the traditional trends on the way people think about pricing...prices can be moved up and down without penalty. You can have sales that are dramatically low and bring the price back up and people don't care. They don't care at all. You can do them instantaneously and you can experiment with them."
He also mentioned the famous Team Fortress 2 Halloween sale, when the game's price dropped from $19.99 to $2.50. The revenue from that weekend jumped dramatically, and more people came back the following weekend and still bought the game at full price. It flips traditional retail thinking on its head, where most any discount is often thought of as permanent and eventually poisonous to a game's perceived value.
Holtman's got it right on a lot of things, but boasting about being able to play the price game "without penalty" may be a tad much in my estimation. One of the other reasons Steam is on top is that it's usually quite hard to cancel a preorder or receive a refund, as many early Modern Warfare 2 pre-buyers probably found out.
Contest:
7:15 PM on 11.18.2009
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The other other option is a game can stay horrendously overpriced forever.
No matter how you spin it, digital distribution has a lot of unknowns that you can easily wind up paying for without realizing it.
Say what?
Now if only there was a way to get shit evened out internationally, it'd be perfect.
It'll take people a long time to get over not having a physical disk in their hands, but the advantages of a digital distribution platform are already piling up. Hey, you're paying for nothing but code, anyway; why not go all the way?
Haha, I won Left 4 Dead 2 in a contest where I had to write a song. :D
Yeah it is DRM but unlike Sony and EA ;Valve is very Laid back and does not make any stupid "YOU CAN ONLY INSTAL THIS 5 TIMES" rules.
steam does take up some system ram, but so far it has not efected my frame rate enough to bother me.
It generally takes one or two online checks before you start a game but after that you can go offline and do whatever you want.
instead of spending hours downloading patches and working though game codes it automatically downloads them.
I like the fact that you do not need the disks to launch your games and you can re- download your games as many times as you want.
I think most people are pretty stupid not to use steam.
I have save myself tons of money, and the weekend deals are amazing.
Steam is more like Xbox live for PC but free and much better in every way.
I know steam is not perfect but it does feel like Software like steam is going to be the next GEN for all PC gamming from now on.
now if only the third party developers like Activision would put COD MW2 for half off on steam I would buy it today, but there is no way I would pay $60 dollars right now for it.
You spelled 'gaming' wrong. Repeatedly.