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The price people play for games should be directly linked to how much fun they are to play with, according to Valve co-founder Gabe Newell.
The typically colourful suggestion was made during an interview with Develop, as part of a discussion on pricing.
“We need to give customers, all of them, a robust set of options regarding how they pay for their content,” he said.
“An example is – and this is something as an industry we should be doing better – is charging customers based on how much fun they are to play with. Some people, when they join a server, a ton of people will run with them. Other people, when they join a server, will cause others to leave. We should have a way of capturing that. We should have a way of rewarding the people who are good for our community.”
Newell even suggested that the most agreeable players shouldn’t have to pay a penny for their games.
“So, in practice, a really likeable person in our community should get Dota 2 for free, because of past behaviour in Team Fortress 2. Now, a real jerk that annoys everyone, they can still play, but a game is full price and they have to pay an extra hundred dollars if they want voice.”
Earlier in the conversation the Valve managing director wrote off the current one price for everyone system as “a broken model”.
Sounds like a great idea to me – especially the bit about annoying people having to pay 100 bucks for voice support. It sounds far-fetched, but if anyone could pull off something like this it’d be Valve.
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