Valve Wants Great Online Players to Get Games for Free!
Develop has an interesting series of interviews with Valve Software. In this one, they discuss the company’s relaxed business practices with CEO Gabe Newell and what makes Valve so special to work for, among other things. However, one of those other things is an idea for a different pricing model, since he believes the current one of one price for everyone is broken, which he describes as a “bug”.
He wants to explore a new model (among others) where people are encouraged to play nice with each other online, the idea being that the nicer you are to others, the cheaper your games become, even to the point that top games like Dota 2 become free. On the other hand, troll and cheat your way around and you pay top dollar for the game, with things like voice funcionality costing perhaps $100 on top. Whether anything comes of this idea remains to be seen, as I’m sure no-one will want to be the sucker that pays for everyone else and will do almost anything to avoid it, including perhaps a full-on boycott should they be selected for premium pricing. Also, what objective measure would be used to identify and label such people?
What you really want to do is create the optimal pricing service for each customer and see whats best for them. We need to give customers, all of them, a robust set of options regarding how they pay for their content.
An example is and this is something as an industry we should be doing better is charging customers based on how much fun they are to play with. Some people, when they join a server, a ton of people will run with them. Other people, when they join a server, will cause others to leave. We should have a way of capturing that. We should have a way of rewarding the people who are good for our community.
So, in practice, a really likable person in our community should get Dota 2 for free, because of past behaviour in Team Fortress 2. Now, a real jerk that annoys everyone, they can still play, but a game is full price and they have to pay an extra hundred dollars if they want voice.
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