아래 원문을 보면, 약간 홍보성이 있지만 흥미로운 아티클이군요.

타 모 게임사들의 게임과는 다르게, 팀 포트리스 2는 출시일부터 97번의 업데이트가
실시되었다. 이건 발매후 1주일당 한번정도의 업데이트율 이다.

제이슨 홀트맨은 현시대에 와서부터 게임은 발매까지가 개발의 끝이라고 보면 안되고,
게이머를 위한 지속적 서비스라고 봐야된다고 했다.

팀 포트리스 2가 97번의 업데이트를 실행하였음에도 불구하고, 스팀은 온라인에
접속한 모든 유저들이 똑같은 버젼을 플레이 하고 있을수 있도록 심리스한 게임
환경을 만들어준다.

또한 전자가격 책정을 통해서 배운게 있다면, 게이머들은 이런 변환적 가격에 매우
긍정적이며, 게임 업계의 미래가 될것이라고 했다.


흥미로운 정보가 있었는데, 품귀될수 없는(매진될수없는) 제품은 값이 낮을수록
제품의 질을 높인다는 것이었다. 이는 제품을 사용하는 커뮤니티가 더욱 더
커지기 때문이라고 설명했다.

[역:예로, 플레이어 수가 많아지면 버그잡을 사람들도 많아지고, 친구들에게 추천할
사람들도 많아짐]

그리하여 제품의 가격이 다시 평소로 돌아가도, 더욱더 크게 자란 커뮤니티는
할인 전보다 잠재 구매자들에게 더욱더 큰 매력을 준다는 것이었다.

이런 변환적 가격은 소매상등 다른 판매자들에게도 별 영향을 안끼치고,
결과적으로 게임업계에 큰 도움이 될것임.

"누군가가 져야만 하는 산업이 아닙니다. 모두가 위너가 되는거죠"

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Original

alve's Holtman: Digital Direct Gives Developers More Pricing Freedom

Service is becoming everything," claimed Valve's Jason Holtman during a Montreal International Game Summit keynote. "It's going to impact every line of business and every line as you think about your game."

As the director of business development at the company responsible for Steam, the PC digital distribution service that now boasts more than 20 million users and 950 games, Holtman has an intimate familiarity with the avenues being made available to game developers by emerging service-driven models, particularly on the PC.

"In the old world you'd have an indirect customer relationship with a product orientation. The most I'd be able to do in the old world is get some feedback with some forms, and make some patches, and then boy I hope people get the patches," he said.

"The direct customer relationship means now that you shouldn't think of your product as 'finished' -- a single piece that goes out monolithically. You should think of your product or the game you're making as an ongoing service to your customer."

Valve has released around 97 updates for Team Fortress 2 since the game was released, and since the game is constantly connected through Steam, users don't need to worry about patches or versions, and Valve can be assured its entire online userbase is playing the same version of the game.

When a game is kept live to that extent, traditional attitudes towards pricing and marketing break down. "Currently, pricing is a function of friction in the system," Holtman said of the retail model. "You've got to sell a certain amount of crates and get a certain amount of shelf space. Mostly, if you're trying to manage a big product, you're doing a bunch of step functions." 

"You launch at $50 or $60, then you sit around for a few months until someone says, 'It's time to go to $30,' and you can never go back. Then someone says, 'It's time to go to the Platinum Series at $20,' and then you're praying it stays there, and then eventually it drops off and it's gone."

Traditional retail wisdom says that lower price points are associated with lower perception of value, and price adjustments are only downward over the long term. 

"But in a connected market, you can shift prices up and down, and people don't care. You can change prices instantaneously," Holtman pointed out. "Customers are incredibly sensitive to pricing. You can adjust the price by five dollars, or a dollar, and you can see the demand curve shift."

Over Halloween, Valve held three two-hour sales, during which Team Fortress 2 was sold for $2.50 rather than its usual $20. The company hadn't announced the sale ahead of time using its traditional marketing methods. 

"We just did a funny blog post," Holtman said. "It just drove people insane." Sales of the game skyrocketed for that period, unsurprisingly, but they also remained at higher levels in the following weeks than they were in the weeks leading up to the sales.

That phenomenon demonstrates a new, somewhat-paradoxical, property of product value in a fully-connected service economy: devoid of the scarcity of goods, a lower-priced product actually increases the overall product's value, because it increases the size of the community that surrounds that product.

The more players there are playing Team Fortress 2, the more attractive that game is to a potential buyer, even after the price has risen back to its normal level. 

That phenomenon also applies to single-player games, since a user who is hooked into the Steam (or another community-driven service) will see more and more of his friends buying the game, playing the game, and possibly earning achievements in the game. "Pricing as a service allows you to do radical things you would never do in the boxed world," Holtman said.

And, contrary to some assumptions, a sales boost in one channel does not seem to adversely affect performance in another channel. In February, Valve held a half-price Left 4 Dead sale on Steam. It was extremely successful, but it also illustrated the nature of the sales model.

"We didn't have any store promotion, because that's hard to set up. How would you get enough boxes into the retailer to do that?" Holtman explained. "But retail [sales] were unaffected. What this fundamentally says is you can actually have lots of extra sales on top of things, and it doesn't mean you're sacrificing one for the other."

"This is not a zero-sum game," he concluded. "You don't have to hurt somebody to win. It actually makes everybody win."

Source: Gamasutra