(via The PA Report - Valve’s Gabe Newell talks wearable computers, why consoles should open up, and game ownership) Steam, and pricing You’ve had a lot of success with Steam, and the bundles, and the sales, and these kind of experiments, do you think at this point you have pricing figured out? Oh no, not at all. I think we’re learning. We tend to–pricing is just part of an overall broader question about–we’re trying to think of it in terms of how we can create more value for customers that’s not, you know, the traditional way of thinking about pricing actually causes you to sort of segment it off from how you think about lots of things that you’re doing for customers. You should think of pricing almost as a service opportunity and think of ways of doing… it’s like a discovery problem. You wanna figure out how you can connect customers with the right collection of content and services and you need to get away from the sort of one size fits all broadcast mentality. Pricing is one of those things where a lot of people are still approaching it in almost a pre-Internet fashion instead of seeing that there’s actually an opportunity to do a better job of delivering the right stuff to the right customer for the right combination of pieces. So if you look at free-to-play, that should be kind of a wake up call to everybody in our industry that we should have been able to figure that out sooner, that this realization that a lot of customers create more value by being in the world than people were extracting by trying to charge them an upfront fee.

(via The PA Report - Valve’s Gabe Newell talks wearable computers, why consoles should open up, and game ownership)

Steam, and pricing

You’ve had a lot of success with Steam, and the bundles, and the sales, and these kind of experiments, do you think at this point you have pricing figured out?

Oh no, not at all. I think we’re learning. We tend to–pricing is just part of an overall broader question about–we’re trying to think of it in terms of how we can create more value for customers that’s not, you know, the traditional way of thinking about pricing actually causes you to sort of segment it off from how you think about lots of things that you’re doing for customers. You should think of pricing almost as a service opportunity and think of ways of doing… it’s like a discovery problem. You wanna figure out how you can connect customers with the right collection of content and services and you need to get away from the sort of one size fits all broadcast mentality. Pricing is one of those things where a lot of people are still approaching it in almost a pre-Internet fashion instead of seeing that there’s actually an opportunity to do a better job of delivering the right stuff to the right customer for the right combination of pieces. So if you look at free-to-play, that should be kind of a wake up call to everybody in our industry that we should have been able to figure that out sooner, that this realization that a lot of customers create more value by being in the world than people were extracting by trying to charge them an upfront fee.