Topic: Steam data for digital sales charts not beneficial, insists Valve

[idolminds]

Uh, ok.

Speaking in an interview with MCV, Holtman said that he believes the “idea of a chart is old. It came from people trying to aggregate disaggregated information. What we provide to partners is much more rapid and perfected information.”

Steam’s metrics allow Valve to keep publishers and developers in-the-know, with hourly updates of download figures so that they can see just how people are responding to marketing efforts. Holtman believes that this is what’s important for the industry, not how a game is faring against other, unrelated titles.

“The point is, it’s not super important for a publisher or developer to know how well everyone is doing,” insisted Holtman. “What’s important to know is exactly how your game is doing – why it’s climbing and why it’s falling. Your daily sales, your daily swing, your rewards for online campaign number three. That’s what we provide.”

Yeah, knowing how well your competition is doing couldn't possibly be useful in business. Please ignore the fact that Valve themselves, a game developer and thus competition, has access to the sales data of every game from every publisher on Steam. Of course, I'm sure they don't ever look at that kind of thing. Its not important, you see.

[Quemaqua]

Seriously, what kind of BS is that?

[Cobra951]

The BS of people with absolute power, and absolute control of information.  Keep buying into Steam, please . . .

[Xessive]

God damn it, every time I buy into a regime it starts going corrupt and "corporate-y"...

[sirean_syan]

You know, if Valve (or anyone else) didn't have that data I could kind of agree on that point in a sort of idealic way. All that should matter is if you're doing well and making a profit. Who cares if X game sold that much more. It's that kind of thinking that supposedly drove Bioware to make Dragon Age 2 what it was as they saw other blockbusters selling millions more. Of course, I know nothing exist in a vacuum and people will choose to buy one game over another because of available funds and these charts help measure success in a certain respect. I sort of think that Valve doesn't produce enough games to be considered competition for a lot of games out there and releasing sales data to the public really doesn't do all the much useful, but I'm sure publishers and developers could benefit from seeing more. It would probably help the arguments against the PC as a viable platform and it would help them judge the potential market size for a given product and, by extension, a budget.

Of course, I'm sure Valve would be more than happy to release the data for a price.