Valve shows gamers love, gamer wallets show Valve coinage.
Valve is one of the best gaming developers out there, pumping out addictively fun games such as Team Fortress 2, Portal and Left 4 Dead.
They're wildly successful too, with a digital distribution service that sends the games direct to your PC without having to leave your chair, but how can they keep this success going in the long run when they don't release a metric buttload of games?
In an interview that was a shock to absolutely no-one, the answer is that Valve simply supports their games for a long period of time.
Arstechnica shared some words with the VP of marketing, and here's essentially what their strategy is:
There is also no set strategy for what comes after launch. "The roadmap for every post-launch release, however, varies with each product. Development for Team Fortress Classic, for example, happened before HL1 shipped, and it was originally planned to be a paid add-on. Then, just before launch, the decision was made to add it to the first Game of the Year Edition, Half-Life: GoTY, and release it online, for free to existing owners of HL1."..."Keeping things a bit open allows Valve's designers freedom to consider what's working in the community and incorporate feedback into future releases."
Each update they apply to one of their games spikes sales, and draws old players back to the game; couple it with a slashed price or free trial and their numbers skyrocket.
Seeing that Blizzard also put in a similar amount of work with constant updates to titles like Starcraft, it's no wonder that this model of limited original games can be as sucessful or even moreso than a silly volume of them (*cough*EA*cough*).
Head over to the full interview at Arstechnica - it's a must-read for any gamer.
Issue: 111 | April, 2010