How Valve “devalued” video games, and why that’s great news

[Barthheart]

Interesting article on pricing...

Valve's Gabe Newell once spoke about a series of pricing experiments on Steam, and stated that a price reduction of 75 percent should mean gross revenue remains constant, based on their prior experience. "Instead what we saw was our gross revenue increased by a factor of 40," he said. "Not 40 percent, but a factor of 40. Which is completely not predicted by our previous experience with silent price variation."

http://penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/how-valve-devalued-video-games-and-why-thats-good-news-for-developers-and-p

[TheCommandTent]

Interesting read, thanks for sharing.

[MIGMaster]

Good read. Maybe the PC gaming machine is finally catching up with the full potential of the PC !!!

Another point - I can't ever see me buying a physical copy of a game again. It's just too inconvenient..... I find it hard to believe that I can say that, as I was suc a staunch supporter of physical acquisition in the past. I guess I'm truly committed to the Cloud concept  ???

[Nefaro]

Which is completely not predicted by our previous experience with silent price variation

What a "revelation".  Who'd have thought that a game publisher's predictions were wrong?  ::)

Now if some of them would wise up about terrible DRM, maybe the revelations would be complete.

[Toonces]

Good read. Maybe the PC gaming machine is finally catching up with the full potential of the PC !!!

Another point - I can't ever see me buying a physical copy of a game again. It's just too inconvenient..... I find it hard to believe that I can say that, as I was suc a staunch supporter of physical acquisition in the past. I guess I'm truly committed to the Cloud concept  ???

I have rapidly begun to come to this conclusion too.  I may regret it in the future, but right now I just love Steam.  It is so frigging convenient.

[Shelldrake]

I don't even want to count the number of games that I have bought through Steam, Impulse, GamersGate, and GOG!

[Bison]

The issue I'm having with digital download is not the method of delivery.  It's that games are increasingly starting to register in the 20+ GB range.  So it takes forever to download and it eats through the download limits set by IP very fast.  Cheap is great until you get the $80 bill for exceeding download limit for a $2 game.