14 DAY TRIAL // Valve’s Head of Business Development, Jason Holtman, talked about the aggressive discounts featured on its Steam digital distribution service and revealed that they don’t harm video games in general, as they just help draw in more people to franchises and developers.
With the growing popularity of digital distribution services like Steam, Origin, Green Man Gaming or GOG, PC gamers have gotten used to seeing many impressive discounts.
This, according to executives from Origin or GOG, do more harm than good, as customers would rather wait for these inevitable discounts than buy games at full price.
That’s not so, at least according to Valve’s Jason Holtman, who told Eurogamer that discounts actually end up helping developers, publishers, and their franchises.
"If this were all about a cheapening and somehow lessening the money out there or somehow customers don't want to pay any more, they think everything should be like a used car lot - sticker price is not the real price - you'd feel that and you'd get real reinforcement of that. We don't see any of that. We see people buying a lot and enjoying it and playing a lot,” Holtman said.
"Discounting is one small function of what we do. It's one small function of our market and our store. It certainly doesn't seem to be anything that cheapens IP. We do it with our own games. If we thought having a 75 per cent sale on Portal 2 would cheapen Portal 2, we wouldn't do it. We know there are all kinds of ways customers consume things, get value, come back, build franchises. We think lots of those things strengthen it."
According to Holtman, if what rivals are saying turned out to be true, then sales would decline in regular periods and only increase during discounts periods, but that isn’t happening, at least with Steam.
"If all that were true, nobody would ever pre-purchase a game ever on Steam, ever again. You would in the back of your mind be like, okay, in six months to a year, maybe it'll be 50 per cent off on a day or a weekend or during one of our seasonal promotions. But our pre-orders are bigger than they used to be. And our day one sales are bigger than they used to be. Our first week, second week, third week, all those are bigger. “
The end goal of a discount, in Holtman’s eyes, is to make a game accessible to those who’ve yet to try it and, if the game is worthy, those players will pay more attention to sequels in the franchise or new titles from that same developer.
"What's happened with those sales is, you've probably caught somebody and introduced them to a game when they haven't had it, and they've played it, and the next time the franchise comes out or the next move from that publisher, the next move from the partner, they've just become more avid gamers.
Steam is expected to kick off its long awaited traditional Summer Sale this month, during which it will implement major discounts on all sorts of big games.