Gabe Newell's DICE Keynote: Left 4 Dead Sales, TF2 Comic Books

[Why Are You Crouching Spock?]

Valve boss Gabe Newell just got done with his keynote address at this year's Design Innovate Communicate Entertain conference in Vegas. It was great! Here are the highlights.

- He says some great sutff about combating piracy. Really seems to hit the nail on the head when it comes to the PC market. He says that people aren't pirating because they're cheapskates, they're pirating because it's a better service. No regional delays, no DRM, instant downloading, that kind of thing.

Which Steam is aiming to match. They're not trying to stamp out piracy, they're trying to catch up.

- The team currently working on Team Fortress 2's excellent character videos are now working on comics. He didn't specify whether they'd be Team Fortress 2 comics, though, but you'd wager it'd be something Valve-related, or he wouldn't be mentioning it now, would he? MTV"s Stephen Totilo has let us know that, yes, they're working on Team Fortress 2 comics

- Steam sales don't increase sales. "Increase" is doing the benefit a disservice. Team Fortress 2 sales go up by over 100% when there's a free update on the PC. And the recent Left 4 Dead sale? That saw sales of the game increase by 3000%. And no, that's not a typo.

- The benefits of Steam as a retail platform don't stop there. Newell also mentioned that for a particular third-party game (which goes unnamed), sales went up 36,000% following a weekend sale. Sure, that's a hand-picked statistic (it's just one game, and we don't know how low sales were beforehand), but it's also an enormous figure.

- Responding to audience questions, Newell believes that it's inevitable that a service like Steam - which started on the PC - will eventually migrate to consoles.


http://kotaku.com/5156238/gabe-newells-dice-keynote-left-4-dead-sales-tf2-comic-books


Shacknews

Valve co-founder Gabe Newell announced during a DICE keynote today that last weekend's half-price sale of Left 4 Dead resulted in a 3000% increase in sales of the game, posting overall sales that beat the title's original launch performance.

Newell also mentioned that new Steam customers jumped 1600% over the same weekend, according to G4TV. Retail sales remained constant.

Sales of Team Fortress 2 went up 106% following a free update to the game. Retail wasn't left out in this case, with sales jumping 28%.

The massive Steam holiday sale was also a big win for Valve and its partners. The following holiday sales data was released, showing the sales breakdown organized by price reduction:

• 10% sale = 35% increase in sales (real dollars, not units shipped)
• 25% sale = 245% increase in sales
• 50% sale = 320% increase in sales
• 75% sale = 1470% increase in sale

Furthermore, Valve has hired an experimental psychologist to maximize the excitement of Steam sales and other marketing opportunities. According to Newell, one suggestion by the psychologist was to provide one free copy of a Valve game to every 25th buyer of Left 4 Dead.

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/57308#


Steams also up to 20 million users now.

http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/6...009-Keynote---Gabe-Newell-Valve-Software.html

 

[TheCorpulent1]

Holy s***, a 3,000% increase in L4D sales? Wasn't L4D selling pretty well before, too?

 

[Why Are You Crouching Spock?]

Yea.
Wonder what the third party game was.

 

[TheCorpulent1]

I bet it was STALKER. They dropped the price on that to like $10 for a week a while back, and my friend recommended it to me after buying it on a recommendation from another friend who'd just bought it.

 

[Joker]

During there big ass sale I bought sooooo much stuff. I got the whole Valve pack, and I don't even like most of those games...It was only $20 cheaper than just Left 4 Dead though, so how the hell could I say no to getting L4D, TF2, and the original Half-Life for only $20 more than just one of them? I couldn't! I also got the ID superpack, Spore, and quite a few others. So yeah, their sales definietly raise the numbers, because their sales are F**KING AWESOME.

 

[TheCorpulent1]

Yep, Valve definitely know what they're doing with Steam.

 

[Why Are You Crouching Spock?]

Yea I bought the ID pack too, good deal.
The Ghost Recon pack was pretty decent too.

 

[Why Are You Crouching Spock?]

Electronic Arts chief financial officer Eric Brown has said that “the online part of our business is growing as much as 60% year over year" and that the PC is rapidly becoming the largest gaming platform in the world.

Speaking during the company’s quarterly and annual earnings call, Brown said that EA’s digital game distribution revenue has almost doubled year-over-year to $80 million. Digital direct revenue as a whole also grew to $400 million during the year ended March 31.


"This is a big year for us… In terms of distribution, the way we look at a lot what's happening in the future is, we've got probably a billion PCs out there in the world," he said, according to ShackNews. "Very rapidly the PC is becoming the largest gaming platform in the world, just not in a packaged-good product."


"As you look at what that means in terms of distribution of product, we think that's incredibly exciting because it's going to open the market to new demographics, new countries and new types of gameplay."
Company CEO John Riccitiello also said that EA plans to introduce two additional "online subscription services" later in the current fiscal year, although he didn't elaborate.


Last week EA Sports president Peter Moore told Edge that the division’s business model of “shipping a physical disc for the PC simply isn’t working” and that online was where the company’s products could be brought to life in the PC space.


http://www.edge-online.com/news/ea-pc-becoming-worlds-largest-games-platform

 

[TheCorpulent1]

Aw, I hope one of those online subscription services isn't a distribution service. Steam getting EA was one of the biggest boosts Steam's had.