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Nicholas Lovell
Home   >   Self-Publishing   >   Distribution   >   If you’re going to vary the price of Your game, Shout about it. Loudly.

If you’re going to vary the price of Your game, Shout about it. Loudly.

By on October 26, 2011

In a fascinating interview on stage at the WTIA TechNW, Gabe Newell gave detailed insight into pricing experiments that Valve has run via its Steam digital distribution service. Some highlights:

    Steam logo
  • On silent price experiments, gross revenue didn’t change. In other words, if the price was lowered, sales rose such that Valve made the same revenue; if the price was increased, sales fell with the same result
  • When Valve ran a 75% sale and shouted about it, sales rose by a factor of 40. Not 40%, but 40x.
  • Valve theorised this was about time-shifting, i.e. that they had simply accelerated demand. Not so. Sales increased at retail and after the sale was finished. A 75% sale significantly increased gross revenue.

If you’re interested, read Gabe’s comments in full over at Geekwire.

About Nicholas Lovell

As well as founding Gamesbrief, Nicholas is a consultant to the games industry on online and corporate strategy and financial matters. He can be contacted at nicholas@gamesbrief.com Following a decade long financial career in the City of London, Nicholas founded Lodestar Partners, a corporate finance boutique that focused exclusively on the games industry. From 2006 to 2008, Nicholas was CEO of GameShadow, a games website and patching engine. He is a non-executive director of developer nDreams and provides consultancy services to a number of companies including Firefly and Huddle.