UPDATED 10:27 EDT / JUNE 22 2015

NEWS

Indie dev on why he doesn’t believe in Steam Sales

One of the reasons Valve Corp’s Steam client is so popular is the frequent discounts the platform gives to games, especially the massive winter and summer sales that last for nearly half a month.

But not everyone is a fan of big discounts or game bundles. Alain Puget, Creative Director of French indie studio Alkemi Games, believes that gamers have come to expect ridiculously good sales on games, and that expectation is changing the way they buy new titles.

“Systematic sales and discounts contribute with other factors (mobile stores pricing, bundles) to decrease the commonly accepted prices of games to absurdly low levels,” Puget wrote in a recent blog post. “It’s now a standard gamer behavior to wait 3 or 4 months before buying any game because you know for sure there’s a major discount coming. It’s so systematic that it’s nearly stupid not to do so!”

Puget explained that the discount trend has changed the way gamers look at prices, and many balk when a game costs more than $20, even when they have no idea how much it costs for a developer to actually create a game. The constant price-slashing is a race to the bottom, Puget says, and it will only hurt developers in the long run.

Puget’s statements echo similar ones made by Polygon’s Katie Chironis, who wrote a piece earlier this year warning that many developers were setting unrealistically low funding goals on Kickstarter, which hurts the platform overall.

“When you ask for half a million dollars when you really need $5 million, it becomes impossible for games with realistic budgets to survive,” Chironis wrote at the time. “It’s not that people don’t understand what a game costs, it’s more that Kickstarter is actively distorting people’s understanding of a sane budget.”

“There’s no certainty that this model even works”

Puget’s Nantes-based studio is made up of only five people, and it is currently working on a side-scrolling shoot ’em up called Drifting Lands. According to Puget, the studio will not be discounting its game through Steam Sales or including it in bundles like the Humble Indie Bundle.

“I may be wrong but I sincerely think that playing along the promo / discount / bundle fashion is bad,” Puget said. “Bad for us and bad for everyone. So we won’t. Drifting Lands will never be part of any sales, never be part of a bundle.”

He added, “Maybe it’s a bad idea in the current context, maybe we should do it exactly like others but there’s no certainty that this model even works. So, we will do what we think is ‘right’ and hope it will be for the best.”

Image credit: Alkemi Games

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Support our mission to keep content open and free by engaging with theCUBE community. Join theCUBE’s Alumni Trust Network, where technology leaders connect, share intelligence and create opportunities.

  • 15M+ viewers of theCUBE videos, powering conversations across AI, cloud, cybersecurity and more
  • 11.4k+ theCUBE alumni — Connect with more than 11,400 tech and business leaders shaping the future through a unique trusted-based network.
About SiliconANGLE Media
SiliconANGLE Media is a recognized leader in digital media innovation, uniting breakthrough technology, strategic insights and real-time audience engagement. As the parent company of SiliconANGLE, theCUBE Network, theCUBE Research, CUBE365, theCUBE AI and theCUBE SuperStudios — with flagship locations in Silicon Valley and the New York Stock Exchange — SiliconANGLE Media operates at the intersection of media, technology and AI.

Founded by tech visionaries John Furrier and Dave Vellante, SiliconANGLE Media has built a dynamic ecosystem of industry-leading digital media brands that reach 15+ million elite tech professionals. Our new proprietary theCUBE AI Video Cloud is breaking ground in audience interaction, leveraging theCUBEai.com neural network to help technology companies make data-driven decisions and stay at the forefront of industry conversations.