EA’s DAvid Martini ruffled some feathers when he said that Steam Sales “Cheapen Intellectual property” and that Origin would not be doing anything of the sort. Ofcourse soon after they did have a 40% off sale which made them look a little…silly. Well now Valve have decided to throw some logs onto the fire with a reply to EA.
Valve’s business development chief Jason Holtman, has decided to fire back at EA’s comments and said that in fact the opposite is true. If slashing 75% off games did in fact cheapen intellectual property, then they wouldnt do it to their own games.
“If we thought having a 75 per cent sale on Portal 2 would cheapen Portal 2, we wouldn’t do it. We know there are all kinds of ways customers consume things, get value, come back, build franchises. We think lots of those things strengthen it.”
DeMartini then went onto say that the huge discounts that are becoming the norm or Amazon, Steam , Gamersgate and the like, did not actually hurt long-term sales
“If we were somehow on a cycle where you could see (a negative impact), you wouldn’t see us repeating it. We wouldn’t repeat it with our own games. We wouldn’t repeat it with partner games. Partners wouldn’t want to repeat it.”
I feel for the console gamers, they see a game for $20 to $40 and class it as a sale, we the PC master race see a sale for $10 and have to think about it. We are a spoilt bunch. I think what a lot of publishers need to realise is that we many gamers these days dont buy games to play games when they are on sale, its almost like gamers have become collectors with the “one day” mentality.
The developer was never going to get the sale for that game that people bought for $2.50. So in no way does it actually cheapen the game. The gamer only bought it because it was “only” $2.50 so really , the publisher just made money from someone that never really had any intention of playing it. Smarten up EA, if you want to win this battle against Steam, you are going to have to act like Amazon , Gamersgate and Green Man Gaming. Provide a good service (its pretty easy to beat Steams customer service..or lack of it), have some decent sales and differentiate. Gamersgate has Blue coins, Green Man Gaming has trade ins, Amazon has everything and Steam has DRM. I mean really, its not that hard to beat DRM.
ea bad for industry,steam игры
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