Gabe Newell's DICE Opening Presentation

[SunnyD]

Originally posted by: lupi
The worse thing about these d/l services, and even steam suffers from this, is that you are only renting the title. It is up to the company to keep function so you can maintain access to the title you "bought".

Above that you have the price point; why isn't the d/l cheaper when no physical components must be produced.

And the third, which I truely love, is when you have a service that offers the d/l at the "standard" price, and then sells the physical copy for an even higher one.

Games work perfectly fine in "offline mode" on steam.

 

[Genx87]

I dont buy retail anymore, only via steam. Sick of losing discs or discs becoming unuesable.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

Agreed, I have lost, damaged or lost keys to more disks. I hate repurchasing just because I don't have some stupid code. I have become a steam convert, I buy steam or impulse whenever its possible. I don't understand the need to resell used games, I've done it a couple of times for some old PS games and they just got a few dollars each when they were slightly more than 1 year old. Thats not a good enough return for me to want to bother.

 

[TantrumusMaximus]

I'm a Steam fan myself but there IS that fear that some day all them downloads won't be there.

Anyone know a link to how to do the offline storage that Sunny mentioned? My friend did something like this with one of the purchases but had issues with it.... but that was at least a year ago.

 

[Lonyo]

Originally posted by: SunnyD

Originally posted by: lupi
The worse thing about these d/l services, and even steam suffers from this, is that you are only renting the title. It is up to the company to keep function so you can maintain access to the title you "bought".

Above that you have the price point; why isn't the d/l cheaper when no physical components must be produced.

And the third, which I truely love, is when you have a service that offers the d/l at the "standard" price, and then sells the physical copy for an even higher one.

Games work perfectly fine in "offline mode" on steam.

That requires you in advance to know you will lose the internet.
Start up Steam, disconnect from your router, and see what works and what doesn't.
Some stuff will, some won't, and that is IMO a problem.

 

[lupi]

Originally posted by: SunnyD

Originally posted by: lupi
The worse thing about these d/l services, and even steam suffers from this, is that you are only renting the title. It is up to the company to keep function so you can maintain access to the title you "bought".

Above that you have the price point; why isn't the d/l cheaper when no physical components must be produced.

And the third, which I truely love, is when you have a service that offers the d/l at the "standard" price, and then sells the physical copy for an even higher one.

Games work perfectly fine in "offline mode" on steam.

That's good if you are only going to play it on that computer. What about if you want to install and then patch it on another.

 

[Kabob]

Originally posted by: abaez
They didn't forego profit margins, they made more money with the mass increase in sales at a lower price than they did with the higher price and lower sales.

Which would be the defenition of foregoing profit margins...they didn't rely on amount of money made off of every copy sold (margin), they instead lowered the price (lower margin of cost : profit) and relied on selling a larger amount and made more capital than with a higher profit margin.

 

[GullyFoyle]

Originally posted by: lupi

Originally posted by: SMOGZINN

Originally posted by: kabob983

Originally posted by: lupi
Listening to gabe talk about digital sales is like being at an emporium where peta is discussion our emergence into the dawn of a no meat intake diet.

As true as that statement is, his numbers support what he's been saying for years, although I'm amazed by how much sheer revenue increases they saw with those discounts. Forego profit margins in favor of sheer volume and wow...

I'm very much a "wait to get it used so I'm not shelling out $60" kind of gamer and a "I love having the disc" gamer/DVD buyer, but I too would happily forego that to get games at a more reasonible price, even if over DD.

I have felt for a while now that the video game industry has not kept up with change in their market. Video games are still priced for maximum single sale profit when they should be priced for market saturation instead. The video games are no longer a niche market, it is now mainstream and needs to change its pricing strategy to account for that.

I'd say that pretty much sums up the situation to a nice point.

Imagine if unless of saying OMG it's costing XXXXX to make this, let's squeeze every penny out of each sale, how about cut the price in half and you'd probably sale more than twice the amount. Not to mention, that could also see a reduction in that nice piracy stuff.

I think there is one factor being ignored here. I don't think just lowering the price of games is going to guarantee they make more money. Think about this: How many of these purchases were due to the fact that it was "on sale" (for a limited time) at a discount?
Do you think if they just lowered the price to $25 permanently that they would have sold as many copies? How many people bought a copy of Left 4 Dead just because it was a temporary opportunity, and that they would probably play it "some day"? If the price had been lowered permanently, those people would not feel the need to jump in, and they would not have seen the success they had.

I know I'm sitting on several Steam games I bought during the holiday sales they I hope to get around to, some day (Portal ($10), S.T.A.L.K.E.R. ($5), Bejeweled Deluxe ($.99) )

 

[dclapps]

^^Dan -- I agree with you; you have to assume some purchased because it was on a timed sale, however, I believe that not only would that number not be statistically significant to recant the conclusion, but by lowering the price and getting the people to pull the trigger, no matter what their intentions, they did achieve to make a profit off the change.

 

[lupi]

True for the sale, but as word/reviews of a game spreads do you think it will sale for more at a given time period at price X, or X/2?

 

[Kabob]

I know tons of people who are buying RacePro for the 360 simply because it starts at $40 rather than the typical $60 (and because they want a racing game too)...lets be honest, the price of games nowadays is a bit disconcerting. A lower overall price will encourage people to buy and buy more often.

 

[abaez]

Originally posted by: kabob983

Originally posted by: abaez
They didn't forego profit margins, they made more money with the mass increase in sales at a lower price than they did with the higher price and lower sales.

Which would be the defenition of foregoing profit margins...they didn't rely on amount of money made off of every copy sold (margin), they instead lowered the price (lower margin of cost : profit) and relied on selling a larger amount and made more capital than with a higher profit margin.

And? Who cares if the profit "margin" is $50 or $10? What makes more money in the end?

 

[QueBert]

Originally posted by: minmaster
L4D was grossly overpriced at $50 anyways. they're out of their mind if they think that's a reasonable price for that game.

I don't know, I paid $50 for the first May Payne, I beat it in 4 days of casual play, maybe 2 hours a day. I did play threw it a 2nd time a year later just because I was bored. So I got maybe 14 hours top out of the game for $50 bucks. L4D I've gotten easily 100 hours out of it. If anything $50 is too low. Can't remember the last game I played over 20 hours on, let alone 100. If I guess 150 hours is how much I've played, that wouldn't be far off. So basically it's like what .30 cents an hour? which might even be a high estimate. where Max Payne cost me almost 10 times that per hour of play. By the end of the year I'll still be playing L4D, so I should be down to the tenths of a cent per hour of play. Can't think of another game besides CS:S where I got so much value for my money. Even if get bored of it in 30 more days, that will be about 200-250 hours played. Which is far more than any other game.

L4D is a steal $50 bucks IMHO.

 

[coloumb]

Originally posted by: DanDeighan
This is an interesting read. Article at www.gamasutra.com

?Last weekend, we decided to do an experiment,? he says, referring to this past weekend?s Left 4 Dead sale, which brought the game down to $24.99 through Steam ? sales rose 3000 percent, and revenue far eclipsed the game?s sales during its launch window.

Meanwhile, Newell notes, retail sales did not change at all (full Steam integration allows Valve to monitor retail sales as well) ? defeating the assumption that Steam sales cannibalize retail sales.

?One thing that really annoys me is the inefficiency of pricing we have in our industry,? Newell says.

When Valve held its recent holiday sale, titles discounted by 10 percent (the minimum) they saw revenue (not unit) increases of 35 percent. At a 25 percent discount, revenue was up 245 percent.

At 50 percent off, revenue was up 320 percent, and at a 75 percent discount, revenue was up an astonishing 1470 percent. Newell stressed again that those revenue boosts represent actual revenue dollars, and not unit volumes.

Eh? Of course the STEAM version is going to obliterate retail boxed version because they weren't on sale that weekend at every single store in the world. And it's a no brainer that sales of a [recently released] game will be directly influenced by the price of the game. Discount it by 50% and you're sales will spike through the roof.