Wed, Nov 18, 2009 | 13:29 GMT

Valve: Online punters “don’t care” if prices are shifted up and down

Valve business boss Jason Holtman has told the Montreal International Game Summit that a direct digital system like Steam means game prices can go up as well as down and people will keep buying.

“In a connected market, you can shift prices up and down, and people don’t care,” he said.

“You can change prices instantaneously. Customers are incredibly sensitive to pricing. You can adjust the price by five dollars, or a dollar, and you can see the demand curve shift.”

Holtman said that in a traditional product model, once your price drops it’s only ever going one way.

“You launch at $50 or $60, then you sit around for a few months until someone says, ‘It’s time to go to $30,’ and you can never go back,” he added.

“Then someone says, ‘It’s time to go to the Platinum Series at $20,’ and then you’re praying it stays there, and then eventually it drops off and it’s gone.”

Holtman voiced the now-familiar Valve mantra of seeing games as services, saying TF2 has been updated 97 times in the past two years.

3 comments

DrDamn
18/11/09, 2:11 pm

So we don’t care and at the same time are incredibly sensitive to it? How does that work exactly?

Dr.Haggard
18/11/09, 2:35 pm

I think what he meant was that with digital distribution it’s OK to raise and lower the price as they see fit, rather than prices always going in one direction.

In a ‘connected market’ they can discount things for short periods and then raise the price again with less resistance, or less fluctuation in demand, than if you do the same thing in standard games retail.

Something like that anyway.

Freek
18/11/09, 3:51 pm

He’s refering to the special offer weekends where a certain game is suddenly incredibly cheap and then goes back up to normal price.