Valve Discusses Charging Customers Based on Popularity

[Dogstile]

But from a corporate sense it is logical... its an excuse to overcharge the largest portions of your population and reward a small handful of people, thus generating more money per copy.

This is exactly why its so brilliant. Especially if Valve doesn't let people know about it.

See, Valve are secretly evil, I TOLD YOU ALL, I TOLD YOU! TOTALLY NOT EXAGGERATING HERE!

 

[VeryOblivious]

I've always had the impression Gabe Newell is an idealistic dumb guy. Until now, I don't feel I'm wrong.

 

[Silva]

Much, much too easy to cheat with this system.

Secondly, what if I make people leave the server because I'm handing them their ass, and not by being mean in any way?

This legitimately happens to many of the best players all the time.

You could shoot yourself and your community in the foot unless you're very clever implementing something like this.

 

[Alpha Maeko]

Sound theory.

Difficult execution.

 

[Canid117]

And Gabe Newell thinks the other systems are broken? Did he not learn from the time he won second place in a Victoria's Secret contest that customers will break any system they are given influence over?

 

[SovietX]

THe problem here is that im not much of a social gamer. So people who make friends and get along with others online get benefits? All I do is just play, I rarely even use the chat feature. I dont like how they will charge people extra for certain features just because they act like dicks. In my opinion, if you pay for the game, you should be able to do what you want.

Also, if they start giving games away, itll probably have some sort of contract that Valve owns your soul or something.

 

[Arehexes]

So If I kill steal someone and he is pissed he will be mad and hurt me. I've been rated bad on XBL because I forgot the controls to a game for a sec. Heck I had a negative rating for me and a friend chatting about random stuff on XBL during a halo match and the person who was complaining called is so many things I can't say here and blamed us for failing (how can you do that when you had a k/d worse the person your complaining about cost the match).

 

[crystalsnow]

I can't even begin to wrap my head around how anyone could see this as a good idea.

 

[Thysios]

I'm all for innovation. I love seeing develeopers try new things even if it doesn't always work. But I believe this idea is far too open for abuse. If they do a voting system where players thumbs-up or thumbs-down people they play with, it won't work. Friends will vote each other up, people will vote others down just to troll, people will spam forums/games asking for votes up etc.

If Valvue chooses people specifically and marks them as 'nice' players or whatever, it would pretty much be restricted to competitive players, or people who contribute a lot of things to somehow get their name noticed. meaning a majority of the community would be unnaffected and still paying full price. I guess it might encourage the community to do more :S but they already give people like that small rewards don't they?

I read a comment above about charging people full price for the games, but rewarding players with 'points' that are redeemable for things in on Steam (At least I think that's what it was, I may have misinterperated it) Which i think sounds like a better idea.

tl;dr: Theoretically it's an interesting concept. Practially it's too open to abuse.

 

[Hikari_Jin]

My only problem with this system is that it could potentially allow all the trolls out there to jack up the price of my games for me, or anyone really. Seriously, think about it. If you attract the attention of the less civilized sect of gaming you could easily wind up paying "a hundred dollars extra for a voice," in TF2, or any other game really.

 

[FogHornG36]

But, i like being a jerk, i have a group dedicated to troll people that complain in bfbc2

 

[BehattedWanderer]

How does it apply to single player games, I'm curious? I happen to not play very many online games, so I still get punished for this? As a system for reward, it's fine, but as punishment it seems a bit ridiculous.

 

[ArmorArmadillo]

I can't even begin to wrap my head around how anyone could see this as a good idea.

Well, basically, a company like Valve wants lots of people playing their games. Some players encourage other people to play by making the experience better for everyone. They encourage lots of others to play the game, and they want to encourage those players to stay because they attract other players to join. Others are awful, and drive people away and cause the player base to shrink.

I think it's worth experimenting with, since Valve's getting into DotA, an DotA and LoL have the WORST player base in all of gaming. They are going to need some way of de-smacktarding these communities to make them approachable for people.

 

[BoogieManFL]

I hate internet jerks as much as anyone, but paying more for being a dick? No.. Couldn't really be sure it was justified. But paying less for being good? Yes.

 

[Eggsnham]

So, like someone else said above, what if one had a bad connection and ended up dropping out unintentionally?

And then what if some random people decide to spite me and make some sort of negative comment/review/complain etc. about me?

Will I then have to pay more to play a game when I'm innocent and the person who decided to wrong me gets to play for free?

I'm sure that they'll have some sort of protection from that, but still. It sounds a little... Dumb.

 

[TheRealCJ]

What about us poor people with only a dozen friends, who only go online to play a game, rather than enrich or destroy the online community.

 

[Nautical Honors Society]

Nope, you should never charge anyone extra money to unlock features of a game they own. Once they buy the game it is theirs even if they are a jerk...just police them without monetary charges. Extra $100 for using voice? Really? Wow.

 

[SkinyJim]

HORRIBLE idea. I can forsee one single person being picked on for a small reason (ie an entire clan submits a bad review) and just for somethingas small as simply not agreeing with a particular persons idea that person would would have to pay mega bucks for the next game. It's completely unfair and would promote bullying.

Where has Valve said they are considering a player review system? If they did that of course it wouldn't work, but an autonomous system could work. Do you agree with that?

I'm not sure how a program would go about determining the decency of people. No algorithms used to measure a persons skill has been perfect. They don't even have perfect accuracy determining someone's meaning in a sentence. So an autonomous system to measure the decency of a person? No way. Not anytime soon at the very least.

 

[gideonkain]

Never gonna happen, Gabe was just talking out of his A$$.

To charge someone for how popular they are is like charging them based on how attractive they are...who's to say what's more attractive?

 

[i7omahawki]

Okay then Gabe, we'll have that system in place, and then we can do the same to developers.

We should only pay full price if the developer is 'popular' enough. If they've churned out some shitty sequels or left a buggy game without any support then their next games' price will be significantly lower.

Will give all the developers reason to step up and provide good content.

But really, this is just a blue sky idea that I don't see being implemented in any decent state. I mean sure, give priveleges to those players who really make an effort to make the scene a nicer place. But don't effectively charge far more to gamers who are unpopular, a lot of good gamers are unpopular for that very reason.

How does that threaten Valve at all?

Where did I say that it did? The point is that it'd be terrible for gaming.

Effectively they'd be paying people to behave on their games, only they get to decide what 'behaving' is.

Again, giving people rewards for playing well is a good idea, but penalizing those who don't, for behaviour that happened on a completely different game, seems unfair and unworkable.

snip

Actually, yes. Valve's idea is pretty damn absurd because they can't accurately measure our popularity, and it seems wrong to sell two identical products of the same quality at the same time for different prices, but refusing to pay full price for mediocre games is exactly what everyone should already be doing.

But the popularity of the developer would be determined by their previous game, not their current one. The previous could be terrible, the new one excellent. Just like somebody could behave badly on one game, and then (if they're not put off by the massive price tag) excellently on the next.