14 DAY TRIAL // Doug Lombardi, who is the chief of marketing at developer and publisher Valve, has said that there was no truth to the information offered by analysts regarding a new trade and exchange program that his company was set to offer using the digital distribution service Steam.
Talking to Eurogamer Lombardi officially stated, “Untrue. We've never had a meeting with Mr Pachter,” adding, “I'm not sure what else there is to say.”
Pachter himself later admitted that his prediction that Steam would offer game trading services for a fee through Steam was not based on any information coming directly from the company.
He said, “For the record, I don’t know anything about Steam’s plans to sponsor credits for games purchased in the past. Mr. Lombardi is entirely accurate that I have not spoken to anyone at Valve about this, and I did not hear anything from anybody other than from the reporter who interviewed me.”
Pachter, who is an analyst with Wedbush Morgan and is known throughout the video game industry for his predictions, does pretty well when talking about sales numbers for titles and hardware but also tends to overreach when making predictions about new services and new launches.
The analyst might have also been mislead by the introduction of the Steam Wallet, which allows players to load money into a Steam linked service in order to be able to pick up downloadable content directly from a video game.
Steam is the dominant content distribution platform for video game on the PC and is widely credited with allowing player to both access a big library of titles and benefit from social tools and from steam cloud saves.
One of the big problems with digital distribution is that it's impossible to sell a video game in order to finance the purchase of another as a gamers can do in brick and mortar stores.