Valve's Jason Holtman on Steam

[Evo]

Valve's business development boss Jason Holtman has talked with MCV about Steam and digital distribution in general. He explains why we don't see sales figures for Steam games and much more. For those of you who read what Randy Pitchford said about Steam this is an interesting quote:[br]

What is your view on the competition? Digital is growing more than ever, and now publishers like Electronic Arts are opening things like the EA Store for downloads. Doesn’t that create a level of conflict?[br]They should open their own stores. The way we approach digital distribution is this: We think that the people making PC games should go to as many channels as they can. And reach as many people as they can. If a publisher or developer wants to build something and reach people Steam cannot, then they should – it’s good for digital. Everyone in the games industry wants to get their game out to as many possible people as they can – and if they want to reach 20 million people, then they also come to Steam as well as working with everybody else.

[br]Why not read the whole thing here.

 

[Shakermaker]

Ooh nice. I love feuding. The gaming industry has such entertaining mud-fights.

Holtman is basically saying: try building your own Steam, but we already have 20 million potential customers. It is not hard to do the math on that one.

 

[Barnz]

It says Activision was one of the first publishers on Steam. I wonder if he's referring to commercial version of DoD, or AAA titles.

 

[msarge]

Quote from the article "...there are a huge number of people who also use it [Steam] just to watch movies or play demos."

Who uses Steam to watch movies?. Why would anyone do such a thing?

 

[Warped]

here is my media folder, lol

 

[ríomhaire]

Quote from the article "...there are a huge number of people who also use it [Steam] just to watch movies or play demos."

Who uses Steam to watch movies?. Why would anyone do such a thing?

Steam is an easy source for trailers and demos but many people don't have credit cards and many like to have a physical copy of their games. These people could still avail of the easily found demos without wanting to buy games on steam. I won't use steam if I hadn't needed to install it to play hl2 and I've only bought one game through it, but I still have used it to download trailers and I've added all my game shortcuts to my steam list to have them all in one place and not crowding my desktop.

 

[Eejit]

Quote from the article "...there are a huge number of people who also use it [Steam] just to watch movies or play demos."

Who uses Steam to watch movies?. Why would anyone do such a thing?

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