Valve: we won't charge for downloadable content

"You buy the product, you get the content," says designer Robin Walker

Valve has no intention of charging for downloadable content for games like Counter-Strike and Team Fortress 2, despite the increased prevalence of premium add-ons in the PC and console markets.

"You buy the product, you get the content," Team Fortress 2 designer Robin Walker told our sister site Eurogamer.net. "We make more money because more people buy it, not because we try and nickel-and-dime the same customers."

"[In multiplayer games] the content you're playing is being created by the players you're playing against, so the more people that get into the game, the more content you're going to have," Valve's Charlie Brown concurred.

Valve's strategy is roughly in line with the traditional PC model, but in recent years services like Xbox Live Marketplace have popularised microtransactions as a means of continuing to extract development capital from completed games.

The practice has also spread to the PC, where Bethesda Softworks, most notably, has charged PC gamers for downloadable content to enhance last year's critically acclaimed The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

Valve's marketing director Doug Lombardi admitted the company had "pretty strong opinions" about how to handle post-release content. "Our philosophy there is, if you buy the product, we put more content out to keep the game interesting, we sell more products."

"Counter-Strike is number one and has been since '99 because we kept the game interesting, not because we tried to charge people more, and that's come back in sales of Counter-Strike," he added.

One thing Valve is attempting in terms of post-release revenue streams is in-game advertising - something that it recently announced plans to add to Counter-Strike.

That decision was made so that smaller developers would be able to offer users more pricing options, among other things, according to Valve co-founder Gabe Newell.

"What I would hope to see is that small developers can give away their titles for free and garner ongoing development support by generating advertising revenue, and we've done all the work to make that possible through the work that we're doing in Counter-Strike," Newell told GamesIndustry.biz last week.

News-Source: http://www.gamesindustry.biz