Valve's 75% off offers - will it help stop piracy ?

but say you had, after a month or so, dropped the price by 75%? that would be better. some games are still £30-40 months after release.
 
I don't know if it'll stop piracy but I seem to buy 50% of these weekend deals depending on the game and if I'm doing it I guess a lot more are too. it's an awesome deal and it's showing what people are prepared to pay.

Maybe they should to 60% deals and see how they fayre with that.
 
Dano said:
Agreed, I'd be more than a little interested to see what M$ sales figures did if they started selling their operating systems at 50% of their current cost too.
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if they started selling them at the cost of a pc game they would probably sell more the amount of pirated copies of all of the window OS including vista is almost as crazy as what it costs for a none home version of there os.
 
I absolutely love steam and i think it's quite addictive buying all the special game packs like Quake and Unreal. I've just bought world of goo simply because it's cheap and as good reviews, heck i didn't even know what it was about!

Valve seem to be doing it right and are the main reason (imo) why the PC as a games machine is keeping it's head above water. I think they should sell games in 3 stages on release £24.99, 6 months later 50% off and a year later 75% off or part of a package.

If empires was £24.99 i would have bought it release day as it's something i wouldn't mind playing but for me it's not a must have and not worth £39.99. You see if games are cheap enough the market for these games becomes larger and gamers like myself will buy a cheap game even if it's not a must have.
 
I've bought a couple of games off steam now due to the price drops that I would never have thought of buying before.

For example I got Lost Planet the other week which I'd never have bought otherwise and to top it off, it's not half bad; mindless fun in the same vein as Devil May Cry 4.
 
pumaz said:
You see if games are cheap enough the market for these games becomes larger and gamers like myself will buy a cheap game even if it's not a must have.
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Yep, in the last few months I've picked up World in Conflict for £1.99 pre-owned. The Unreal anthology for £3.99 along side UT3 for £4.99 both new. Stalker was £1.99 new... Amongst others, now I love crysis, but I payed £20 somthing pounds for that and if I picked other random slightly dated games I reckon the time & enjoyment of the Bargin Bin games would outweigh that of just a single release day title...
 
arknor said:
if they started selling them at the cost of a pc game they would probably sell more the amount of pirated copies of all of the window OS including vista is almost as crazy as what it costs for a none home version of there os.
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XP oem is only like 50 quid? :p
 
Pinkeyes said:
I've been taking a bit of an interest in this.

So far Steam have sold Lost Planet, Left 4 Dead and now World of Goo with 75% off in recent weekends.

Reading this article recently, and it looks like they have been experimenting with these offers, and found they are making more money with these very low prices.

So as they have nothing to produce once the game is written, and if they continue sell them at these prices, a lot more people will buy them (as has been proved), they make more money, the games makers make more money - and everyone is a winner.
Surely this is the way to go to stop piracy.
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Unfortunately it will make little difference other than convert some illegal copies into legitimate. Think about it say they sell 1M copies the profit margin will be tiny say £1 per copy. Compare that to the £150M+ console games can make in their first week and you can see its a drop in the ocean. Best thing companies can do is something like the following:

1: Have a £15 max price point limit on all new digital downloads which is fixed for 6 months before its reduced.

2: After a year have a £3-5 price range.

That way they become so cheap even the most die hard pirate will think more about how easy it is to get a fast download speed than wait to get an often buggy pirated copy.

Sadly the way human nature is the pirates are never ever going to buy many games so PC gaming will continue to decline sharply as it has been for the past 2 years (compared to console game sales). PC has worldwide over 100M machines capable of gaming at a level equivalent to current consoles yet few PC games ever sell 1M or more copies. Most big titles sell in the 500-900,000 range which is why you see few companies talk about the magic 1M figure on the PC in their accounts. This is totally pathetic as its a tiny percentage. Nvidia say they have shipped over 80M Geforce 8 or higher gfx cards. You gotta assume most of these are not intended for business PC's!! IMO most PC pirates think that spending their hard earned cash on exotic hardware means they are excempt from buying any software and nothing anyone says or does makes any difference to this philosophy. Nvidia+ATI have the most to lose here so they should get together and find ways to have encryption keys running in their gfx drivers which cannot be tampered with or you lose your display and give the codes to developers or MS so it prevents piracy.

Not going to happen though as they refuse to believe its their problem to stop the decline of the whole reason they sell PC gfx cards:rolleyes:
 
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[TW]Fox;13646254 said:
Because it isn't that simple.

Imagine a market where 200,000 people may want, at some point in the next 2 years, to purchase a game before it becomes obsolete.

You could sell it for £30 and maintain sales of 10k a month. You will make, over the course of one month, £300,000.

Or you could sell it on special offer at just £10. The entire market buys the game in the first month. You make.... £2,000,000. Wow! Thats loads better!

But wait.

At £30, you might have sustained lower sales. £300k x 24 months = £7,200,000.
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I see your point and in a niche market this would apply, but in a growth market such as gaming it isn't really an issue, in fact your more likley to increase your potential audience and they are willing to take a punt at a lower price point.

Apple tried a similar pricing strategy and found that sales increased by 50% by lowering the price by 1/3.

Online distribution channels such as steam make a long curve solution possible and hopefully it will be used more in the future.


The only issue of these weekend deals are that people that paid full price may become annoyed and hold off buying products in the future. A consistent pricing policy at whichever price point is one i would tend to favour.
 
It all comes down to that old chestnut of an argument that every pirated game is a lost sale, which it clearly isn't.

AWPC, that's pretty shocking reading about those Nvidia figures, you do have to consider just how many pc's are massively oversold though. Take for example the kids playroom pc I had to fix last week... top of the range XPS system with nowt on it but a couple of kids learning games and the software it shipped with, still even discounting stuff like that and the odd office that somebody supplies top end gfx cards for it's a very big deficeit, do you have a source for it at all?
 
platypus said:
Set things to a reasonable or even good price and more people buy them? Who would have thought?!
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Yep it took them this long to work it out :(

I've bought loads of cheap games on Steam over the years.
 
Dano said:
It all comes down to that old chestnut of an argument that every pirated game is a lost sale, which it clearly isn't.

AWPC, that's pretty shocking reading about those Nvidia figures, you do have to consider just how many pc's are massively oversold though. Take for example the kids playroom pc I had to fix last week... top of the range XPS system with nowt on it but a couple of kids learning games and the software it shipped with, still even discounting stuff like that and the odd office that somebody supplies top end gfx cards for it's a very big deficeit, do you have a source for it at all?
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Yep Roy Taylor (Nvidia PC gaming relations VP of TWIMTBP program fame). Sometime last year he dropped the eye opening 80m Geforce 8 figure or better (I was wrong not 100m GF8) but including ATI its obviously well over 100m probably closer to 140-150M. Yet still PC games struggle to sell which is shocking as most people with a GF8 or higher will be gamers surely??

http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS130380+26-Aug-2008+PRN20080826

http://www.electronicarts.in/news/mirroredge_nividaphysxtech/

If its not extreme piracy then I would be very surprised as who on earth would waste money on a decent gfx card and not buy superior to console version games on it when the PC can do everything including hassle free wireless gaming??

Take away say 20m for all the SLI/crossfire setups or people who are either ignorant or indifferent to PC games and you still have at least 100M decent PC gaming machines in the world with owners who are very aware of what the PC can do then you can see how shocking this is. Take Fallout3 one of the most popular games of last year sold around 5.7M copies so far worldwide. Only 17% of those are on the PC which is last after PS3+X360 and you can see that the PC really is facing an uphill struggle to compete for developers/publishers attention nowadays.
 
Now I'd be really interested to see some stats on the number of X360's vs sales figures for the top selling games to see what sort of percentage they achieve in comparison to the number of consoles out there, mmm, I'll be googling after I've had some sleep...
 
I never buy fulled priced games anymore, these steam offers have given me great games that I wouldnt have taken a look at when offered at full price.

Ok I may be a tight arse but thats better than being a pirate
 
[TW]Fox;13646254 said:
Because it isn't that simple.

Imagine a market where 200,000 people may want, at some point in the next 2 years, to purchase a game before it becomes obsolete.

You could sell it for £30 and maintain sales of 10k a month. You will make, over the course of one month, £300,000.

Or you could sell it on special offer at just £10. The entire market buys the game in the first month. You make.... £2,000,000. Wow! Thats loads better!

But wait.

At £30, you might have sustained lower sales. £300k x 24 months = £7,200,000.
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This is a bit flawed though, mate... even if it is all hypothetical. You've assumed that the audience is the same size in both examples - in which case, of course it makes financial sense to charge each of those punters £30 instead of £10.

You should have instead increased the size of your market proportionally in relation to the amount of discount applied to the price. As the article (linked in the original article) says

When Valve held its recent holiday sale, titles discounted by 10 percent (the minimum) they saw revenue (not unit) increases of 35 percent. At a 25 percent discount, revenue was up 245 percent.

At 50 percent off, revenue was up 320 percent, and at a 75 percent discount, revenue was up an astonishing 1470 percent.
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I don't know how this would translate into unit sales, but it shows roughly how much you need to increase your market size as you decrease your selling price.

Also, you made a mistake in your calculation for the "fixed price" example. You said the market was 200,000 people buying the game over a 2 year period. However, you then went on to say they sold 10k copies a month, therefore over the 2 years they'd have sold 240,000 copies not 200,000. You should have either increased the "variable price" market accordingly (thus £2.4M in month 1) or reduced the monthly sales figure for the "fixed price" model to 8,333 per month. ;)
 
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