Digital Price Drops Don't Hurt - Valve

[Hectic Glenn]

Speaking today at the Montreal International Game Summit, Jason Holtman of Valve (Director of Business Development) talked about how Valve are able make dropping prices of large titles on Steam effective, increasing sales over a period of time and stop the title feeling like a bargain bin product.

Fundamentally people thought that with pricing if you ever decreased the price of a product it hurt your future sales and it hurt your product as a whole. Don't ever take a top-end product and go to USD 5-10 because everybody's going to remember and they'll never buy it at the high price again, they'll think it's in the bargain bin.[br]But in a connected market 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

Such practice was evident during Halloween when Valve released new content and dropped TF2 to $2.50 several times.<blockquote>When we took the game up back to its full price after we gave away all that free content and gave away lots of copies – tens of thousands of copies – we actually increased the user base and more people came back the following weekend and bought it at full price than we were selling the week before</blockquoteJason also mentioned when Left 4 Dead was sold at 50% last Christmas and Valve moved more units of Left 4 Dead on that weekend than at launch. Read the full article here.

 

[Captain M4d]

I'm glad it's doing them good. I fully support them in enabling me to be a cheap-ass.

 

[Hectic Glenn]

Also related to the success of Steam, this weekend gone saw the 2,000,000 simultaneous Steam users record broken. Mostly due part to L4D2 & MW2, with contributions from Dragon Age Origins, Borderlands and Torchlight too. Oh my how you've grown!

 

[Escaep]

. Oh my how you've grown!

Thats what sh.....this is great news!

 

[alchemistlord]

I'm glad it's doing them good. I fully support them in enabling me to be a cheap-ass.

Indeed.

 

[Kyorisu]

Cheap games makes everyone happy. My brother is being a stingy bastard and waiting for a L4D2 discount. Funny man but he won't have to wait too long.

 

[Warped]

do they take into account people who thought the game was cheaper and put it in their cart and the sale ended?? i wonder if there are a few gamers who just clicked and didn't notice, even after paying the bill

 

[Uriel]

Freaking
Love
Valve

 

[Paulaner]

Is it me or prices on Steam (in Europe) are still higher than retail? I'm not talking about deals, they are ok. You don't have to be a genius to realize that lower prices bring more sales.

 

[hool10]

There was a reason more people bought 50% off sale Valve than full price L4D Valve. Too bad they didn't realize that with the sequel. BUT I learned my lesson that Steam does overcharge all the time. L4D 2 is $55 right now. On Amazon though it's only $40 and I think I get free shipping as well http://www.amazon.com/Left-4-Dead-2..._2?ie=UTF8&s=videogames&qid=1258636811&sr=8-2. On Newegg it is also $40: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...43&cm_re=Left_4_Dead_2-_-32-130-243-_-Product

 

[Eejit]

There was a reason more people bought 50% off sale Valve than full price L4D Valve.

Wait, I don't understand. What reason? Why would people want to buy something during a sale?

 

[Vegeta897]

The people who bought the full priced version are given priority in the content servers when updates are downloaded.

 

[Lobster]

It must suck to have to worry about a few bucks here and there.

 

[StarBob]

Cheap games makes everyone happy. My brother is being a stingy bastard and waiting for a L4D2 discount. Funny man but he won't have to wait too long.

I'm doing the same for Modern Warfare 2... except I don't think they'll have any sort of discount until Christmas. L4D2 was best purchased in a 4 pack where it was only like $34.

I think I've basically purchased all of my steam games while under some discount, whether preorder, weekend deal, or another random buy. That reminds me, what about this weekend's deal? Frontlines Fuel of War? Is that any good? It looks nice I just don't know anything about it and I'm too lazy to read reviews.

 

[Crazy_killer]

Doesn't hurt us either, I guess that makes it a win-win situation.

 

[chimpmunk]

The people who bought the full priced version are given priority in the content servers when updates are downloaded.

Care to back up this claim?

 

[Vegeta897]

Care to back up this claim?