EA Decries Steam Sales: "They Cheapen Intellectual Property"

[Smooth Operator]

He's kind of right. Developers work hard to make games, by just waiting for prices to drop and sales to come up, they don't get the amount of money that the developer may deserve. I'd personally aim to sell games at $30-40 online (For the AAA budget title), this allows developers to get the amount that they are shooting for, while still providing cheap enough value for consumers.

Steam proved time and again that putting games on sale will often result in higher profits overall, so not only good for the customer but also for the devs.

EA is just taking pot shots at Steam yet again, but hey flapping ones mouth aimlessly is a cheaper marketing move then offering a competitive service.

 

[Alexnader]

Once again, EA being idiots?
Not surprising at all.

snip

Yeah, except for the fact that i personally know several people who torrented Mass Effect 3 specifically BECAUSE they had to use Origin.
Shit, i download anything that has SecuROM on it even if i don't want to play it, just to make a point. You can be damn sure i'll never buy anything from Origin, or even anything that requires origin.

Yes making those big titles Origin exclusive would have hurt their sales, however I don't think you and your principled pirating mates would be in the majority. ME3 and BF3 are huge games that already had a devoted following who can be counted on to buy the game regardless of DRM/spyware.

Lets say EA decides it wants a digital distribution channel because it and its shareholders have noticed steam finally. In order to garner a userbase they can either try to do what steam does, which dominates digital distribution and is almost universally loved by the market. Or they can maintain the pricing plans they've always had and just force people to use their product.

In order to beat steam at its own game they'd need to do it better than Valve in order to overcome the amount of hate that EA has had directed at it since before Origin. It seems a somewhat justifiable choice to not bother with all that.

EA doesn't want your love, it doesn't even want your money. It wants most people's money and you my principled friend aren't most people. Battlefield 3 alone has led at least 1.9 million people to overcome the biggest hurdle in adopting Origin, creating an account and installing the client.

 

[Susurrus]

I actually agree with EA on this. It used to be that I'd finished every game I owned. Now, with steam sales, I have games I haven't got round to playing yet, that I bought months ago. Sure, I only dropped £5 on them, and I will play them, but at the same time... And with frequent, deep-discounted sales, it's difficult NOT to buy titles I'm vaguely interested in, so having games I haven't played doesn't stop me buying more.

It also cheapens intellectual property in the sense that unless the game is damn good, I probably won't play it too much, because I have other games I could play. It's only when a game is great that it holds my attention. Which is a shame, because I used to have fun playing those that were not so great, but still serviceable. I guess it's a phenomenon where, having spent less money on games, I'm less invested in them. Which probably leads to less of a fanboy outlook, and more of a blase attitude.

For example, I played Stalker: Clear Sky, recently, having picked it up for £3. I loved Shadow of Chernobyl, and played it to death, and I've also completed whatever the newer one is called. But I didn't come close to completing Clear Sky - bad design decision after bad design decision kept getting in my way, and after a point I just thought "No". That would not have happened if I'd paid £20 for it...

Having said that, I think the actual effect is that developers will only be able to get away with making bad games for a shorter period of time, which is probably what EA is afraid of. Furthermore, EA sells games for terrible prices (as does Steam, when stuff is no on sale), so I'm going to keep waiting for those deep discount sales, until a happy medium is struck.

 

[MeChaNiZ3D]

True, developers don't get as much money as they probably should in most cases. True, prices for games are unreasonable on the consumer end. Why doesn't EA...make less F***ING MONEY?!

Obviously they're not quite THAT principled.

No but really. Cheaper games does not 'cheapen the intellectual property'. This is a barely masked attempt to make as much money as they can, and audaciously, trying to look like a good guy. Please...this after they've said they expect games they publish to have DLC and online passes. EA, you guys are bastards, live with it without losing any more of your dignity.

All this said, sometimes Steam prices are a bit too cheap. But there are only two points on the spectrum, sale price on Steam and launch price everywhere else for months. So until companies can find a decent price to sell at, people will buy off Steam, as they should.

 

[mysecondlife]

Funny. I thought I read news of developers saying they earned more in 1 day on steam than they ever did in xbox live.

 

[Vegosiux]

I guess they're trying to get more devs to sell on Origin with a promise "We're not going to sell your games cheap". I'm not entirely sure they get this "customer relations" thing. I mean, after all, people are going to pay what they think the game is worth, and if you have a choice between someone buying your game at a reduced price or not buying it at all, try explaining to the stockholders why you opted for the second one.

 

[Dendio]

They are right, but blowout sales are a legal business tactic and benefits the consumers. It may hurt the industry, but it helps both consumer wallets and steam.

 

[blackrave]

It sounds right, but only for well known developers and IP
For newcomers their first game needs to attract as much attention as possible
And Steam sales is a good way to do so

Besides sales are a good way to get more money from consumers
Maybe I don't want to pay 60$ for your graybrown-nonamerican-killing-simulator/military-porn-number-9-[insert manly subtitle here]
But for 20-30$ I might give it a try, to check why people still buy them

Also there is such bs as charging same price for physical and digital copies
newsflash! digital copies cost less, so either give discount for digital copies or increase price of physical discs.

 

[UltraPic]

Seems EA are talking out of their arse. Valve actually released some info a while ago (I can't for the life of me find it now) showing that the more they decreased the cost of a game in a sale, the more money they made.

75% discount actually generated huge sales and profit, far more than 50% and 25%, and more importantly, every discount increased sales AND profit above the 'base' price.

So actually EA, far from cheapening your games, Steam's sales give your IP much needed growth, as they vastly increase the sales AND profit of them.

If they make more money selling games at a quarter of the price, why not sell them at that price in the first place. Steam's sales make you wonder if your an idiot for paying for any game if it's not passed off as being heavily discounted, it's not as if any anyone's out of pocket apart from the customer.

 

[Rainmaker77]

Seems EA are talking out of their arse. Valve actually released some info a while ago (I can't for the life of me find it now) showing that the more they decreased the cost of a game in a sale, the more money they made.

75% discount actually generated huge sales and profit, far more than 50% and 25%, and more importantly, every discount increased sales AND profit above the 'base' price.

So actually EA, far from cheapening your games, Steam's sales give your IP much needed growth, as they vastly increase the sales AND profit of them.

If they make more money selling games at a quarter of the price, why not sell them at that price in the first place. Steam's sales make you wonder if your an idiot for paying for any game if it's not passed off as being heavily discounted, it's not as if any anyone's out of pocket apart from the customer.

I am guessing a portion of those extra sales is people seeing the deal and getting swept along with the furore.

 

[xDarc]

So should we still be paying full price for Doom? EA is full of god damn clowns. Where were they in the 1990s, defending IPs from the insult of bargain bin at Best buy?

I hate these guys so much, they could replace all the nazis in the Indianna Jones movies with them and it would still work for me.

EA... I hate these guys.

 

[madster11]

EA doesn't want your love, it doesn't even want your money. It wants most people's money and you my principled friend aren't most people. Battlefield 3 alone has led at least 1.9 million people to overcome the biggest hurdle in adopting Origin, creating an account and installing the client.

That's the really annoying part for me.
Don't get me wrong, BF3 is a good game, but it's simply not good enough to make me use origin.
To the general public though, origin just seems like any other online service to them. They don't understand what EA has the rights to do once you're using, or what EA plan if it ever becomes big (Imagine in Origin ever became the 'go-to' digital dist. service? All games, $60usd, $120aud forever and if you don't like it they remotely delete your data.).

I personally blame the 12-16yo crowd who would buy a Battlefield or Call of Duty game if they had to sign away the rights to their ass in full view of bubba holding a bottle of lube. The fact that it's impossible to organize a boycott in the gaming world because the majority of players are either too stupid, too stubborn or just plain too assholish to give up shooting some pixels at pixels for a week is what's wrong with this industry. If people stopped giving EA money for even just a week to let them know to stop their bullshit, it would fix so many problems.

Alas, it's never to be. All the consoletards and child PC gamers will gladly bend over for Origin providing they get another hit of Battlefield of Duty: Modern Amphetamine 6, which means EA will eventually win and then we'll be 'buying' games full price for the rest of our lives.

 

[ThriKreen]

Am I the only one that noticed the "deep-discounting" part of the interview?

Since I play BF3 a lot, I've noticed Origin has had sales now and then, like aforementioned BF3 for $20 or something a couple months back. So they are not adverse to having sales, just really deep discount sales like offering a $50, only been out for a month game for $5.

And yes, there are customer perception issues for games, like anything under $10 is viewed as bargain bin, shovel ware quality. Which is what I think he was trying to get at.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

And yes, there are customer perception issues for games, like anything under $10 is viewed as bargain bin, shovel ware quality. Which is what I think he was trying to get at.

Meh? When I bought Portal 2 for $7, at no point did I think "Gosh, this must be shovelware". I just thought "boy, what a great deal".

I'm quite capable of distinguishing between actual shovelware and quality games offered at huge discounts.

If EA wants to be Nordstrom, the first step is offering a higher quality product. Not just pricing the same product higher and assuming this will grant it some vital mystique.

 

[ThriKreen]

Meh? When I bought Portal 2 for $7, at no point did I think "Gosh, this must be shovelware". I just thought "boy, what a great deal".

I'm quite capable of distinguishing between actual shovelware and quality games offered at huge discounts.

Yes, YOU might be, as you are probably an informed consumer, who researches the game before hand.

Now what if you saw it in the bargain bin for $5 and you didn't know it was made by VALVe?

In fact, does anyone ever go rooting through a bargain bin?

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Yes, YOU might be, as you are probably an informed consumer, who researches the game before hand.

I don't know that I'm an anomaly though. People today are fairly media savvy.

 

[Tony2077]

price means nothing if people don't want to play your game

 

[Twilight_guy]

So they are saying they don't want to have really good sale because it cheapens the work of developers. That logic doesn't fly in any other industry in the entire world. Not to mention it essentially says that its not going to be doing something good for customers to customers. This is not good PR, why are they trying to spin this as a good thing? 'we're not having good sales' is not a good way to advertise EA. Somebody needs to fire the guy in charge of the marketing department because he's clearly huffing paint.

 

[Tuesday Night Fever]

Thoughts? Were you able to get through that without exploding into merry guffaws?

Nope, I wasn't able to. Thanks for the laughs, EA!

Anyway... yeah. I think I agree with many of the people in this thread in that sale prices don't somehow detract from the IP or anything. Frankly, in a lot of cases I think it actually helps.

I know I'm not alone in that I have a lot of games on Steam that I bought during Steam sales, but otherwise would not have bought. Period.

I have no interest in flight simulators, but a friend of mine insisted that H.A.W.X. was fun. I wasn't sold on the idea, so I never bought the game and was content about it. Then one day, along comes a Steam sale, and there's Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. for $2.50. I figured that even if I didn't find it fun, I'd pay more than that for a hamburger, so what the hell, why not? $2.50 might not be much money, but it's $2.50 that would not have been spent on the game AT ALL had it not been for the Steam sale.

And there are a whole bunch of other games I could have used in that example instead of H.A.W.X... Plants vs. Zombies, Just Cause 2, Defense Grid: The Awakening, and on and on and on and on.

 

[Quakester]

"We [Origin] won?t be doing that [deep-discounting in sales]. Obviously they think it?s the right thing to do after a certain amount of time. I just think it cheapens your intellectual property. I know both sides of it, I understand it. If you want to sell a whole bunch of units, that is certainly a way to do that, to sell a whole bunch of stuff at a low price. The gamemakers work incredibly hard to make this intellectual property, and we?re not trying to be Target. We?re trying to be Nordstrom. When I say that, I mean good value ? we?re trying to give you a fair price point, and occasionally there will be things that are on sale you could look for a discount, just don?t look for 75 percent off going-out-of-business sales."

Translation: "We're not trying to give everyone a chance to buy these games, we want them to be horribly overpriced so we can throw more money on our huge pile of money."

I totally understand the point they were trying to make. They want to make it seem like they just want everyone to charge a fair price for a fair day's work and Steam sales are screwing the developers by offering their products at a loss for the developers. However, it comes off as extremely disingenuous coming from one of the largest game developers on Earth who reported $3.8 billion in revenue this time last year. This is the same company that paid millions of dollars for the exclusive NFL license rather than compete with a company that offered their games at a fair price.

Yeah, so not buying the sob story. Oh and using Nordstrom as an example, not wise. That story is notoriously overpriced.