Andy Chalk said:
That's not necessarily related directly to Steam sales or Humble Bundles - a lot of developers would no doubt say they're very empowering - but people seem too eager to say "these games aren't worth full price" when the truth is they just don't want to pay that much.
There is no difference between those two statements. Not being willing to pay a given price means that, to that purchaser, the good is not worth "full price".
Pricing is a subject pretty well understood by the people paid to understand it. You price your good at X dollars, you sell Y units. You sell your good at W dollars, you sell Z units. You do that math and now you have a baseline for how best to maximize your revenue from selling your product.
Of course these same people paid to understand that are pretty clever, so they have come up with ways to extract even more money, by selling the product for X dollars to the people willing to pay X dollars but also selling the product to those who will only buy for W dollars. That is where things like sales come in. Sales help maximize revenues for your product. There are tricks, like day one DLC, special editions, and different regional pricing. The people selling games today are VERY sophisticated and have come to the current pricing measures because they maximize revenue.
You seem to be coming from a place where you believe that these sales are being imposed on developers and publishers. They are not. Steam does not say "Your game has to go on sale". They offer publishers the opportunity to partake in sales, and now are even allowing publishers to set the timing on the sales. The publishers are putting their games on sale because they MAKE MORE MONEY that way. You have to understand that. This isn't out of the goodness of their hearts. It helps their bottom line.
You know I think you jumped the gun on your original position, and now you are caught backpedaling. People have already pointed out the different tone presented in this article as opposed to the tone of the article when EA said the same thing. You are now saying nebulous things like "I would like to see a greater appreciation for the value of games" and "We're in a really weird place right now: Guys like Notch and Garry Newman can make millions from indie oddities, while an artist or a coder who worked on BioShock Infinite has virtually no job security."
Personally I don't think there has been a greater appreciation for the value of games ever before. There is more discussion and participation in gaming than ever before, with an explosion of online analysis, conventions celebrating games and the art of creating games, and people entertaining others by playing and commenting on games online.
As far as the disparity between Notch making Fedora hat money on Minecraft and Irrational Games getting shutdown after releasing a well reviewed game, there is no great mystery there and it does not have one thing to do with Steam sales.
The success of Minecraft I could write a thesis paper on, so I won't get into that, but Irrational was closed because their game took too long to make, was too expensive, and didn't make enough money. It is a sign of the ballooning costs of AAA development, not an indictment of sales. This is something that has been facing AAA development for a long time. AAA has always been a hits driven industry, much like big budget Hollywood movies, and if you spend $200 million making your game, as Infinite is rumored to have cost, and take 5 years to develop it, then your game better make $400 million, which is something Bioshock Infinite, despite its relatively healthy sales, was never going to do.
