Buyers Who Purchased Modern Warfare 2 Via Steam Discover DRM Puts Them 2 Days Behind Everyone Else

from the that-sucks dept

When talking about video games, we sometimes hear that Valve's Steam is one of the few examples of "DRM that works," but that's hard to accept when you hear ridiculous stories like this one. Apparently people who downloaded Modern Warfare 2 via Steam, expecting to be able to play the game today (along with everyone else who bought it in a store today) have discovered that the DRM has been setup so you can't actually play the game until Thursday. Ouch. It's yet another example suggesting that Infinity Ward really does not care at all about PC gamers. The game will likely sell millions of copies anyway, but it's really amazing to see how badly the company treats its PC gamer fans.

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Valve Exec Explains How To Compete With Piracy

from the service,-value,-pricing dept

Last month, an exec at Valve Software noted that "Pirates are underserved customers" and said when someone realizes that, they also discover: "I can do some interesting things and make some interesting money off of it." It looks like the company is sharing some data to back that up now as well. A whole bunch of you have been sending in reports from Gabe Newell's keynote speech at DICE. Newell is the founder and managing director of Valve, and he provided plenty of reasons that show that "piracy" is not the issue at all: service, value and pricing can easily trump piracy.

He started out by pointing out something that we've discussed in the past: digital content is best viewed as a service, not a product. As a service, you focus on providing continual value -- and people are paying for that future value (which is a scarce good prior to delivery), rather than an infinite good already created. There's value in paying for that future (scarce) service, and it trumps paying for an abundantly available good.

From there, he noted that the reason "piracy" is doing so well is that the "pirates are ahead not just on price, but on service." In fact, he noted that since DRM decreases the service value for customers, it also tends to increase piracy, rather than decrease it.

Then, he showed how that combination of service and smarter pricing allowed the company to run experiments and make a lot more money -- competing quite successfully against piracy. The most stunning example: last weekend, the company ran an experiment with the game Left 4 Dead. It heavily discounted the price, and sales shot up 3,000%. And this wasn't just a case of building off a small base. The sales over the weekend were more than when the game launched.

In fact, it looks like a big part of the problem facing the industry is that they charge way too much for their products. Here are the numbers Newell shared from Valve's experiments with "sale" pricing:

• 10% off = 35% increase in sales (real dollars, not units shipped)
• 25% off = 245% increase in sales
• 50% off = 320% increase in sales
• 75% off = 1470% increase in sales

Newell then says when they decrease the price by 75%, they are making 15% more than when they were charging at full price -- though, I'm not sure how that math works out from what's stated above (I've been playing around with the numbers, and something is missing...).

Between all of this, it's pretty clear, yet again, that "piracy" is hardly the issue. If you provide a valuable ongoing service at a much more reasonable price, there's no problem at all. Once again proving that the issue is a business model issue, rather than a legal issue. It's too bad so few old school content providers are willing to recognize this, and quite troubling that some folks in our government are still missing this as well. It's going to lead to bad laws and even worse enforcement of the law.

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Valve Exec: Pirates Are Just Underserved Customers

from the and-then-you-see-the-opportunities dept

We've had a ton of people submitting this, so figured a quick writeup is in order. Jason Holtman, the director of business development and legal affairs for Valve, was speaking a video game conference, when he noted: "Pirates are underserved customers." This is a point that plenty of folks have been making for a while, but having an exec at a company like Valve make it is important. But, even more important was his next sentence:

"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.'"

This past weekend at the MidemNet conference (on which I'll be writing much more), I heard a few music industry folks say something at least somewhat similar to the first part of the comment: talking about how they had to learn to bring "pirates" back into being legitimate customers. But, then they missed that second part. As one attendee said, the music industry execs kept freaking out about how much money they will lose, while ignoring how much money there is to be made.

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