Origin Boss Says Steam Sales "Cheapen Intellectual Property"

[omicron1]

You mean the $60 price point is not within a lot of gamers' acceptable price ranges? Huh. Who'd've thought.

What he seems to be missing is that the 75% model is not common for at least a year or so post-launch. While some people may go straight for the sale, the new-priced product will still bite day one.

Yes, in a way this cheapens games in general... But it's a cheapening as a result of expanded consumer choice. It's a cheapening that should have happened, regardless - Steam just did it first and best.

By the way, EA, $20 is not an acceptable bottom-range price. When I can get your games on Amazon for a fraction of what you charge, it's time to reexamine some priorities.

 

[Soviet Heavy]

I bought Sins of a Solar Empire: Trinity on Steam for 20 bucks. Since I liked it, I spent full price to preorder Rebellion on Steam for 40. There's your sixty big ones EA.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

Let me do a quick count here.

Number of games I own on Steam: 73
Number of EA games I own on Steam: 5

Number of games I own on Origin: 0
Number of EA games I own on Origin: 0 (natch)

For any given game, there is a maximum price I will pay for it. Many times that price is $0 (I don't want the game). Once in a while, that price will meet or exceed the release price. I decide what is worth my money and how much of my money it is worth.

Mr. DeMartini doesn't seem to like this. In his mind, developers and publishers are the sole arbiter of a game's worth, and all gamers who are interested in a game will buy on release date for full price if they know that the price will never go down (or at least not until the sequel is out). Apparently he believes that all the games available on Origin are SO good that everyone will shell out $40-60 for them, if only those industry-hating villains over at Steam would stop trying to RUIN GAMING FOREVER.

News flash, Dave. I determine how much I want to spend for a game. If you never lower the price below that amount, I never buy the game- simple as that. And I'm far from the only one; the gaming community is not entirely composed of impulse buyers with bottomless wallets. If you think Steam sales cheapen intellectual properties, how much harm does no sale at all do?

 

[Treblaine]

I think it would have been really silly for anybody to ever expect EA to do the kind of sales that steam does. Steam is able to do them for the same reason places like walmart and target can. When they put stuff on sale its not them that is eating the difference its the guys who made the product. EA on the other hand is the guy who paid to make the product.


The problem with steam sales is that they do hurt developers. Because of steam sales more people are willing to wait till the game goes on sale to buy it. Because of this you get less sales within the first couple months. Now this forces developers/publishers to agree to put there games on sale on steam just to make up the lost money. This leads to more people wanting to wait to buy games on sale. This leads to a never ending cycle of steam making tons of money and fucking over everybody who created the games.

It is different for small time indie developers though since they cant afford to advertise their games. They are forced to take a massive cut in profits just to get their game known.

Steam does the same big deals with their games, the ones they put their money into. Hell they have made several of their games free to play, even and opened up steam to competing free-to-play games on their service.

Publishers willingly enter into these promotional deals because they make more money by people buying their games who would never have considered their games. Better to get $10 out of them than NOTHING out of them. There is no way to predict sales. Valvedoesn't screw anyone over, they take a smaller cut just like the developers but everyone makes more money and people play more games.

EA is greedy, everyone makes less money and play less games.

 

[Syzygy23]

I swear i've heard this before...pretty sure the guys at GOG said the same thing...

...and I still don't think they're right...

Like it or not, there's no arguing that Steam [http://store.steampowered.com] sales don't offer tremendously good deals.

I think you meant "DO"...

If everybody buys games just because their cheap and not because their good,then yes that decreases value.
Also everybody waiting is not good for the dev´s who need money the moment their done with a game and not 5 months down the line.

I think you meant to say "they're". All three times.

I'm usually not such a grammar nazi, but seeing someone miss the mark 3 times in a row just twists something inside of me.

As for EA's statement here...

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Cry some more EA, cry some more. I wouldn't use their service even if they DID offer sale prices that could compete with steams. See, while the execs at EA were attending business school and learning how to crush beer cans against their heads, the guys at Steam were actively working within the game industry as developers, testers, etc. How much you wanna bet that none of the top dogs at EA actually PLAY games?

 

[lancar]

The ignorance of EA has crossed the boundary into the realm of hilarity

Seriously, it's like they're completely disconnected from the real world!

 

[5-0]

Hahahahaha...just get the fuck out, Origin, you're embarrassing yourself.

 

[Xanadu84]

Because people don't pre-order or buy games on release any more...umm...wait a second...

No. People still buy games at release. The desire is too great. What steam sales do is let a publisher make every single dollar from every single customer they possibly can in the long term. Because there is such little overhead in digital distribution, sales maximize profits. In addition, if you release a good game and it goes on sale, you have more people playing what amounts to a demo for your NEXT game. You ALSO build up goodwill with your consumer.

And lastly...even if EA believes this...why would they say it? It makes no sense to say, "Oh we are going to not drop prices because of...some lofty idealism about value of IPs". Yeah, even if that argument wern't BS, no one is going to like an argument that demands that they pay more. If you were half way decent at spinning, you wouldn't be trying to convince people that they should pay more and like it.

And lastly...project $10. It makes sense for you to make $10 off an older, used game, right? Why not make that $10 of a sale on a DD site, and cut the game retailer out of the picture entirely to encourage even more sales?

 

[Treblaine]

There are no differences to eat up in digital distribution. It costs nothing to produce a copy of a game. Steam is not giving sales out of the goodness of its heart, but simply because it is very profitable. Players buy many more games than they would otherwise. Valve explains this in the employee manual.

Now, EA's motivation is a mystery. It looks like they just genuinely hate gamers. Their policies are sure not helping their stock.

Yep because we all know games cost absolutely nothing to make. Nope, there is no millions of dollars that you need to make back or anything. Steam does not have to worry about this because they did not make the games. It you had bothered to read my post you would have seen that I already addressed everything you mentioned.


Also there are costs associated with digital distribution and thinking otherwise is extremely ignorant.

That's not what he said. He said:

"It costs nothing to produce a copy of a game."

Once you have the digital distribution structure in place it costs the same to run whether you sell one game or 100'000'000 copies. Valve picks up the bill for distribution costs: the game makers send them a file and Valve distributes it via the internet to the millions of people who bought it. But valve has the infrastructure, every moment people aren't using it to full capacity they are wasting what they have already paid for. It does NOT cost extra to distribute more copies of a game.

You don't seem to understand the question or the basics of the situation.

 

[martyrdrebel27]

Yet another reason Origin will never be able to truly compete with Steam.

Well their servers are better than steam´s and don´t crap out when you don´t want them to.
Also the games launch faster.

Congratulations, your the first person I've ever heard say good things about Origin.

actually, i have something good to say about origin. when it first launched, i decided to check it out, and saw on the digital store Spore and The Sims 3. I knew that i had purchased physical copies of these games before and made sure to register them, but now had no idea where the discs were. I contacted customer support and within an hour was talking to someone who gave me digital licenses to Sims 3, Spore, Creepy and Cute and Galactic Adventures, because I had registered them. They could have easily said no, but didn't. This was the first time I was happy with EA in a long time. Especially when I've some horror stories about Steam's customer service.

but i guess what really matters is that I was on Steam earlier today. I was on Origin earlier last year...

 

[Clive Howlitzer]

That sounds like a load of crap to me. If people still want to buy certain games, they will buy them at full price. This just gives a chance for people who literally do not have the money to buy the games at full price a chance to get them. It is also a good way for people to pick up games that they are on the fence about and likely never would have picked up anyway.
The sales do nothing but help. You can argue that it harms sales but I don't know about that. Amnesia: Dark Descent continued to make tons of money on steam sales, even when it was going for 5 dollars instead of its original 20. The Developers specifically said it all evens out in the end.

 

[Best of the 3]

This would be true if games were targeted at a niche market. They're not, they're selling them as quickly and as many as possible to everyone. Saying that sales will cheapen the IP makes it sound like a luxary product. But games are owned by so many people now can they really be called luxary? Nor can they charge luxary prices and still break even. I doubt it.

 

[Rednog]

I kind of see his point, but god forbid there is even any reason to discuss it considering there is 4 pages of "Fuck EA".
Any person with half a brain knows that anything released a month or two before Winter/Summer is going to be on sale in Steam's sale extravaganza. I wish I could find Total Biscuit's Mailbox on a somewhat similar topic. Things like sales and bundles are supposed to be for when the amount of full price sales has dropped off quit a bit and the sale/bundle is the last hurrah for the game. For example I saw TB's play through of Dungeon Defenders with the devs and I was like oh wow this is awesome, and picked it up on launch. And what do I find 2 weeks later? Steam is having a sale for 50% off. Or take another example of Botanicula, it was thrown in a freaking bundle on launch day. The indie scene has basically taught me to never buy at the full cost because you're pretty damn sure to see it in the very near future for pay what you want.

Don't get me wrong, I buy a lot of stuff from steam sales, but there is a big different between buying a game that is several years old when it's on sale and buying a game that was just released in the last 3 or so months for an obscene discount.

 

[ScrabbitRabbit]

i bought amnesia through a steam sale and i like it. if not for that sale i wouldnt of purchased it.

And numerous people went and bought the whole Penumbra series because of how good Amnesia is, so that sale may well have contributed to an increase in the sales of that developer's entire back catalogue.

 

[TAGM]

"What Steam does might be teaching the customer that, 'I might not want it in the first month, but if I look at it in four or five months, I'll get one of those weekend sales and I'll buy it at that time at 75 percent off'"...

So, what, you mean like just about every store in the world? That's how the entire market has worked - full price over the first few months, then discount that stuff at the end of its cycle. That is pretty much the working model for EVERYTHING with a limited cycle of noticeable sales, clothing, food, you name it. And if it's worked fine for who-knows-how-many-years with them, why can't it work just as well for Steam?

Mind you, the steam sales sometimes have a CRAZY amount off, but that's good for giving one more reason to say "Hey, might as well try, right?" I mean, if you have a bit of interest in, say, a £40 game, and then it gets a 75% off deal, that's £10 - that's not as big an investment, so that added to the bit of interest = game purchase. Times that by however many people think like that - and that's probably a lot, given the general feeling of cynicism around the gaming community nowadays - And that's a lot of £10 that wouldn't have paid £40 before. So, it's not a £30 loss, so much as a £10 profit.

 

[Beryl77]

There are games which I like a lot. I buy those games at full price if I've got the money. I don't wait for those games a couple of months for a sale.
Then there are games which I won't buy at full price because I either don't like it enough or I'm not sure whether I'd like it. For those games I wait for a sale. If there is no sale, I won't buy it. I don't devalue those games, I simply can't afford to throw my money away. Different games have different value for me, if I'm going to pay full price, then I have to be sure that it's worth it. If the price is lower then I have much less to lose in case the game turns out to be crap. I'm more willing to risk a purchase.
There are so many games in my Steam library which I would have never tried without a sale.

Of course this is just the usual shit flinging from EA. They don't believe these words themselves, EA's games have been often enough on sale on Steam. They're just trying to sound like some exclusive store.

 

[xXTheParadoxXx]

You know what else cheapens IPs?

flogging them to death with yearly releases and lazy DLC

CAPTCHA: dueling banjos. what the ef?

 

[Sion_Barzahd]

... and if you listen reaaaal carefully you can hear him whining in envy.

I honestly don't think that this guy makes a remotely decent point. I mean, if you really want a game you'll buy it straight away to hell with the money you could save waiting several months, however you see a game you're considering buying but can't justify it for that price and then along comes a steam sale and you gobble up a decent deal for a game you were on the fence about!

This way that company has earned money from you purchasing it at all and increased sales from a particular studio of series of games can often mean that whilst they didn't make a whole lot of cash due to sales, they've gained popularity and sequels would earn a bigger profit.