http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2009/11/valve-listening-to-pc-gamers-frequent-updates-equal-success.ars"This would make a good intro for your article."That's Jason Holtman, Director of Business Development for Valve. You know, the guys who make Half-Life, Left 4 Dead, and a little service called Steam. We're wandering around a packed hotel in downtown Montreal trying to find a reasonably quiet place to talk. It's not easy. But eventually we find a spot and sit down for some coffee and start talking Steam and the PC gaming space. He then begins to lay out the secrets of Valve's success. The good news? If you're willing, that success is easy to reproduce."Steam's allowing developers to get a lot closer (to customers) and iterate more quickly," he explains. According to Holtman, there's a "change in the air" with regards to customers who are always connected. "We've definitely learned a fair amount about people being connected," he told Ars."A lot of what we've experienced in some ways could be called unexpected, but in a good way," Holtman continues. "If you ask me to predict what's going to happen in two years, where Steam will be, I could try, but I'd probably be wrong...Part of what we've learned about that is you have to keep listening to your customers and you have to keep listening to developers, because we're in both businesses: making games for customers and making services for developers.""It really pays to listen."But there's more to the digital space than just distribution, Holtman says. Service is key."You have to understand why people like things like auto-updating. You have to understand why people like things like anti-cheat technology, lobbies, or achievements."And, as he told me earlier, it all comes down to listening. "Customers will tell us what they like," he explained. "And they're actually usually far better predictors of success than we ever could be."As for PC gaming as a whole, Holtman isn't too worried despite the doom and gloom that seems to surround the platform. "I think we may have been seeing a slight symptom," he said. "And I think in the coming years it's either gone away or it's going away completely."I think you're going to find big titles on the PC are actually going to start taking advantage of some of the things that the PC does really, really well...I think you're going to see the big guys looking at what the small and medium guys are doing and saying 'I don't know why I can't do that.'"The next day, in front of a crowd of developers, students, and even the occasional journalist, Holtman reiterates what he told me during a keynote speech at the Montreal International Games Summit. Only this time, he provides numbers.Team Fortress 2—which has had a mind-boggling 97 updates since launching in 2007—for example, saw some great success when the Sniper vs Spy update was released. Sales on Steam jumped 520 percent, retail was boosted 40 percent, gifting increased 71 percent, and total player minutes were up 105 percent.And when Left 4 Dead had a half-price weekend sale on Steam, sales jumped 3,000%, while the number of new users increased 1,600%. In fact, more units were moved during that sale than during the game's launch."It (the PC) is where things are going to happen," Holtman boasted to the crowd.Rewind a day, and I couldn't leave our discussion without bringing up a certain topic. Randy Pitchford. More specifically, his controversial comments about the Steam platform."Like I said, we're always listening to developers," Holtman explained. "It's how we think we'll make Steam better. Particularly to those comments, no comment."
