Tag Archives: Jason Holtman

Valve’s Jason Holtman has said the firm isn’t too keen on platform exclusives, thus the reason the firm doesn’t purposely set out to create Steam exclusives.

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Valve’s business development chief, Jason Holtman, has reiterated to PC Gamer that sale on Steam in no way cheapening intellectual property nor do they “cannibalize” sales.

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Valve has said it doesn’t have plans at present get into the streaming technology business.

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Valve has said EA’s accusation that sales cheapening intellectual property is wrong as it can benefit games, publishers and gamers.

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Valve business development director, Jason Holtman, has said the idea for the firm’s Greenlight was inspired by Team Fortress 2, its “hat manufacturing game… that’s awesome.”

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As rumours suggested last week, GameStop has now officially confirmed it’ll collaborate with Valve to sell Steam Wallet codes in its stores across the US.

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The Evolve segment of Brighton conference Develop will this year be keynoted by Valve business development director Jason Holtman, organisers said today.

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Steam manager Jason Holtman has said Valve would like to have more games available on the digital service, and more indie games in particular, but at the same time, the firm doesn’t wanttop overcrowd the service’s marketplace.

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Valve is starting to look at bringing Steam functionality to mobile phones, according to the firms Doug Lombardi and Jason Holtman.

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Valve keeps its Steam sales figures a secret. Steam head Jason Holtman said this isn’t a situation that’s likely to change.

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If anyone knows about what “pays,” it’s Valve. Dominion over 70 percent of the online retail game space is nothing to scoff at, after all. Fortunately, Valve’s finally decided to share its wealth – or its wealth of knowledge, anyway. Advice, ho!

“Part of what we’ve learned about that is you have to keep listening to your customers and you have to keep listening to developers, because we’re in both businesses: making games for customers and making services for developers. It really pays to listen,” Valve’s Director of Business Development Jason Holtman told Ars Technica.

“Steam’s allowing developers to get a lot closer (to customers) and iterate more quickly,” he added. “We’ve definitely learned a fair amount about people being connected.”

He also expressed faith in the PC as a gaming platform, saying that publishers will start reaching for that slice of the gaming pie again before too long.

“I think you’re going to find big titles on the PC are actually going to start taking advantage of some of the things that the PC does really, really well…I think you’re going to see the big guys looking at what the small and medium guys are doing and saying ‘I don’t know why I can’t do that,’” he explained.

Sounds like a personal problem to us, Mr. Big Guys. Tons more through the link.

Valve’s Jason Holtman has told GI.biz that rival digital download sites like Direct2Drive, Impulse and Gamersgate that refuse to sell Modern Warfare 2 over the inclusion of Steamworks are missing out on business.

“To our minds, we think that if you’re making a good game and it’s got the services a customer wants it should get out in as many channels as possible. If you have a good portal and you’re good at collecting money from folks, and attracting them, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be,” said the business development director.

“We try to make those services that developers and our customers want. Whether another distributor wants to carry them or not, we don’t have any say in the matter, that’s between Activision and other online distributors.”

Direct2Drive accused Steamworks of “forcing the user to install a Trojan Horse” earlier in the month, and while Holtman didn’t “comment on the comment” he did say that a lot more games featuring the tool are set for release.

“The interesting thing is, those games that have Steamworks features in them are really made to be the things customers want. Developers are choosing the features that make the game better. There’s no service where there are features you have to have, developers are choosing between those, he said.

“There’s a lot of games that came out in 2009 with Steamworks, and they’ll be a lot more games in 2010 that have Steamworks.”

Grab the link for the rest.

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.

More on Gama.

Montreal International Game Summit organizers officially revealed the five headline speakers who will keynote the sixth annual industry event November 16 and 17.

The official keynote speakers include:

• Yoichi Wada is President and CEO of Square Enix Group, will share his vision of the future of video game development.
• Paul Holden of Media Molecule will speak about challenges encountered in developing LBP.
• Valve’s Jason Holtman will talk Steam and the SOURCE engine.
• Heather Chaplin, author of Smartbomb: The Question for Art Entertainment & Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution.
• Chris Hecker from Maxis/EA will deliver the closing session where he will attempt to answer the question “Can videogames be considered as cultural products in the same way as literature or theatre?”

Full press release is below.

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The game pirate is not a thief, Valve’s Jason Holtman told the Game Business Law summit at SMU’s law school today: he’s just eager to keep up with the Joneses.

“There’s a big business feeling that there’s piracy,” said the developer, adding that the truth is, “Pirates are under-served customers.”

Publishers are missing a trick by trying to combat piracy with traditional methods, said Holtman.

“When you think about it that way, you think, ‘Oh my gosh, I can do some interesting things and make some interesting money off of it.’

“We take all of our games day-and-date to Russia,” he added “The reason people pirated things in Russia is because Russians are reading magazines and watching television – they say ‘Man, I want to play that game so bad,’ but the publishers respond, ‘You can play that game in six months… maybe.’

“We found that our piracy rates dropped off significantly.”

There’s more on GameDaily.