What Would Matt Do

If you’re a PC gamer, you most likely know what Steam is. If you don’t, I’m not calling you dumb…to your face. If you don’t know, it’s basically a service to buy and download games from Valve (and other companies that work with them…which is a lot these days). Whatever the case though, Gabe Newell shared some percentages of what happens when they give deals or make updates with their games on Steam:

Price changes in the retail world don’t allow for much freedom. Steam and other services offer flexability. In fact, users apparently respond to pricing discounts within five minutes.

Valve was afraid that too many price changes would "confuse and anger" customers. It isn’t the case.

Last weekend, Valve decided to do an experiment with Left 4 Dead. Last weekend’s sale resulted in a 3000% increase over relatively flat numbers. It sold more last weekend than when it launched the game. WOW. That is unheard of in this industry. Valve beat its launch sales. Also, it snagged a 1600% increase in new customers to Steam over the baseline.

Worried retailers, fear not. The weekend sale didn’t canabalize sales from retail. In fact, they remained constant. Well, constant isn’t a 3000% increase, but it’s still pretty good, right?

Looking at a third-party game, it saw increases of 36,000% with a weekend sale. Oh. Em. Gee. Okay, Gabe is starting to convince me that PC at retail is going to die very soon.

Oh, more data. I’m such a data nerd. Here’s some data!

During the Holiday sales:

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

At 75% off, they are making 15% more money than they were at full price.

There are a few conclusions to draw from this. The first being that Valve is mother fucking rolling in money. They aren’t at Blizzard levels I’m sure, but damn, they have to be making a pretty penny. Kudos, Valve. There were a lot of questions when Steam first started (not to mention bugs and annoyances)… turns out Valve is/was just at the forefront of the industry.

I knew those deals and updates were working for Valve, but I had no idea how much. With those kind of numbers, I have to believe that this is the beginning of the future. How can huge companies like EA resist numbers like that. As a matter of fact, they are already signed up. The question becomes, who won’t sign up? If they aren’t signing up with Valve, it’ll be with Impulse or something else like them.

So far, I’m pretty happy with Steam. It’s got it’s little annoyances here and there (like Dawn of War II using both GfW and the Steam service). That’ll just take time to figure out I’m sure.

The future is now and Valve is leading it. I really couldn’t ask for a better company to be setting the standards for online game buying. I’m incredibly grateful it’s not someone like Sony or EA. For that alone, Valve is awesome.

What Would Matt Do: I’ll probably buy DoWII on Steam today or tomorrow. I was thinking of buying it at Best Buy or the like, but what do I gain from that? I can’t think of any discernible advantage and I can think of a few disadvantages (having to have a hard copy of the disc, etc). Also, I’m listening to the Flobots today. If you like hip hop and haven’t heard of them, they are worth looking up.