14 DAY TRIAL // Valve's Gabe Newell is one of the video game personalities that as leader of his studio, as a designer and public speaker, gets a lot of attention from the gaming world.
One of the reasons is that his company has managed to constantly launch very good and, at the same time, innovative games, form the first Half Life to the latest Portal 2, and another one is that Newell is in charge of Valve, the digital distribution platform which has become vital to PC gaming.
And, in an interview, Gabe Newell has come up with yet another idea that might prove to be revolutionary further down the line: making what he calls “jerks” pay more for video games and balance it out by offering discounts to well behaved players.
The “jerk” category includes those who make multiplayer, whether it is cooperative or competitive, problematic for other players, by hurling insults, refusing to cooperate when needed and generally being obnoxious and arrogant.
The idea faces significant hurdles before it can be implemented, the biggest of them being that there's no objective way of telling whether a gamer is a jerk, meaning that the whole evaluation process will need to be based on the input of other gamers, which opens up a whole can of worms.
Some might define “jerks” as all those who are better at the game.
Some might define the category as those who like the color blue.
The discounts for well behaved players concept might be unworkable in its entirety but as player loyalty becomes more important for companies in the gaming space discriminating on the basis of good behavior might become an important concept.
It might mean a more restrained and courteous gaming space, especially when it comes to multiplayer, but Gabe Newell's idea could also lead to a bigger corporate presence in the gaming space.