INTERVIEW: JASON HOLTMAN & DOUG LOMBARDI, VALVE
Doug Lombardi, VP of marketing: So we used Steam as the fulfilment mechanism for retail pre-order, in that sense.
JH: At the end of the day, everyone likes a fight. Everyone likes to have a diametric opposition, and when we look at it, this is not a fight, this is about people getting their product out to as many people as possible. Retail and digital, they’re both awesome channels. They’re both very important for games companies. Publishers should absolutely have their games in stores, and should absolutely promote people going to retail. The idea is to get more copies out to people so they can play.
Do you have good relationships with retailers? JH: Yeah, completely.
DL: It’s funny because at first there was this inertia, and people loved to write the story that Valve wants to kill retail, or that Steam is a retail killer. I can’t remember a single moment when I said that, or when Gabe [Newell, Valve CEO] said that, or when Jason said that. But it’s been printed more times than you can imagine.
Well, it’s because retailers tell us this. That’s the thing. DL: And I think that they believed it as well. It’s just that the more we talked to them about this, the more they realise we are on their side. The Orange Boxhad a certain retail budget, and Left 4 Dead’s retail budget was about fifty per cent bigger than that, and Left 4 Dead 2’s was about fifty per cent bigger than even that. Portal 2’s budget was just as big – I mean, we are talking about millions of dollars. Retailers are receiving all of this and they have a great relationship with us. We’re shipping our games on PC, Mac, but also Xbox 360 and PS3.
And people get free access to the PC version only if they buy the PS3 version of the game. Once retailers see these activities over time, they’ll realise that we are their partners. By and large, I think retailers have become comfortable with Steam, as a promotional channel and as a PC and Mac platform.
www.mcvuk.com
There’s so much more we can do together. We sold both Left 4 Dead 1and 2on consoles to three million customers. That’s all through the doors of retail. That’s six million sold boxes in two years.
6m
Boxed sales of Left 4 Dead and its sequel over two years
And you want to progress further in this space? DL: Yes absolutely, until our games sell more than Call of Duty[laughs]. There’s the upside. I mean, the sales of Left 4 Dead 2are a quarter of what Activision did with COD. So we have a lot more to do at retail. And that doesn’t have to be at the expense of what we’re doing on Steam.
JH:We’re not here to put channels at war with each other. We are here to maximise as many channels as we can. Retail is so incredibly important. People trade with cash. People who don’t know about Valve walk into stores. Retailers know where to place stores. Retail reaches out to people buying gifts,
and the millions of people that are not using Steam.
Do you want to have a rival in the digital distribution space? JH: I think it’s a big wide open space, digital distribution. There are things to be worked on, there are features to be built, there are customers to attract. We do have folks that are out there and do different things. They just box it up differently. You have Metaboli, Direct2Drive, Amazon – the latter is getting into this space in a big way.
EA recently said retail charts are a bit useless in determining what is popular, because digital is needed for the fuller picture. That led to a question on why don’t firms like yours release digital charts data? JH: We do have digital distribution charts. Our partners have them. The reason why retail charts had to exist was because everybody
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