Valve Hired an Economist

Not sure if any of you care, but apparently there's going to be a weekly blog post about all of Valve's virtual economies and whatever.

Quote:

This is how my relationship with Valve began. While a total ignoramus of the world of video games (as per my confession above), the people at Valve and I discerned a double coincidence of interests. My academic curiosity blended nicely into Valve’s burning desire to serve its gaming community better, through the development of services that are in tune with the community’s needs as gamers but also as traders, developers, participants in something much bigger than just video games.

By studying Valve’s economy, we would have an opportunity to enhance the experience of its customers, in addition to sharpening my own thinking about what makes real economies tick. And as if all this were not enough, there was another incentive thrown into the mix: the opportunity to understand better the remarkable social organisation of production within Valve itself. (But more on this in another post…)

http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/econo...strange-email/

This is just an introduction of sorts, but I really look forward to what comes out of this in the future.

[grazr]

Quote:

the opportunity to understand better the remarkable social organisation of production within Valve itself.

I like to look at it as "common sense".

http://www.ted.com/talks/jason_fried...n_at_work.html

As companies start to understand a more liberal approach to a working environment actually increases not only productivity rate, but quality, we see companies like Google and FaceBook adopt similar approaches to running a creative business.

[Fr0Z3n]

Fun fact: The only other game to do this is EVE online.

I find this really interesting, and a bit of a nod to how far video games, its developers and the industry have come in the past 10-15 years.

[Trotim]

...you know, seeing TF2 having become this and needing this is interesting, but it still mostly makes me sad.

Meanwhile: Korea Bans Commercial Game Item Trades

It's not just TF2, though. It's that and CSGO and Dota 2 and trading games on Steam and what makes players buy things at various costs. It's far, far more than TF2.

[Micnax]

Can they hire a timekeeper too?

[Prestige]

invest in items in games other than tf2 i guess? seems like they are gonna nerf tf2 items' value somehow. how on earth are they going to make portal hats valuable at all when no one plays that game anymore.

[Trotim]

Meh, CS:GO and Dota 2 and TF2 all use the same system I thought. Steam sales and pricing may be interesting I guess.

And how is cross-game trading even supposed to work? Like when someone has a rare Spiral Knights item, and trades it for a Dota 2 item, and then gets a TF2 item... don't they all have different currencies? Does every dev team just need to do to their item system whatever some "lead of virtual items" person tells them next, or be excluded from Steam Trading? Or some team screws up and their items have some exploit, do the connected games' economies just have to deal with it or is the dev team penalized etc.

Sure it's interesting. I still don't want to be part of it or have to deal with it, even indirectly. Still think games aren't there for farming, hoarding and primarily making money but whatever.

Some people won't buy Torchlight 2 because it won't have serious trading because of the moddability and no "always online DRM" and think the game is awful because of that. I'll never understand that I guess.

edit: I think the main... issue I see is that the value of virtual items is always based on how difficult they are to obtain. That can be rarity and thus chance and what I think equates to gambling, or it is a long amount of time (i.e. grinding) needed to get it - usually both. At least the latter shouldn't be a big part of games in the first place, is just filler content, a time sink. And the former reinforces that and leads to addiction, or at least obsession. Not to mention there is no real scarcity, it's all arbitrary - there's an infinite supply and none of the items have any production cost.

Unusual hats and strange weapons in TF2 both don't improve gameplay one single bit, are both just there for, well, the money in the end.

"But it's still fun", a lot of people say. Yeah, well... it seems to be a very fine line to tread. Board games are fun, you can play them whenever, you can stop whenever. Games with persistent collecting though, like CCGs... I used to say I played CCGs but I never actually have - that is I did play them, but with all cards unlocked via online suites, none bought.

It's just still creepy to me I guess. People become so dependent... well, that happens sometimes. What's creepy is that the studios design the games specifically to make you dependent and keep playing past the point it "should" still be fun.

Not trying to start some war again, this is just the best way I can currently describe it. There are some games that try to do it "normally", and I guess TF2 or Spiral Knights or LoL or Tribes:Ascend aren't thaaat bad, but some games are super predatory and I'm afraid of it getting even worse in the future.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Prestige

invest in items in games other than tf2 i guess? seems like they are gonna nerf tf2 items' value somehow. how on earth are they going to make portal hats valuable at all when no one plays that game anymore.

what are you talking about

Quote:

Originally Posted by Trotim

Meh, CS:GO and Dota 2 and TF2 all use the same system I thought. Steam sales and pricing may be interesting I guess.

And how is cross-game trading even supposed to work? Like when someone has a rare Spiral Knights item, and trades it for a Dota 2 item, and then gets a TF2 item... don't they all have different currencies? Does every dev team just need to do to their item system whatever some "lead of virtual items" person tells them next, or be excluded from Steam Trading? Or some team screws up and their items have some exploit, do the connected games' economies just have to deal with it or is the dev team penalized etc.

I don't think they are trying to enforce any kind of standard. And I don't think that an exploit will really destroy the entire Steam-wide economy. Everything has a perceived USD amount attached to it that people think about (at least indirectly).

If you can do a 1:1 trade for something from TF2 to SK, and then SK gets some item duping bug, I don't think it'll stay 1:1 and ruin TF2. It just doesn't make sense. It'll go to 1:4 or 1:6 or something. I mean, look at the old D2 economy and the way the D3 one is shaping up. As gold and item farming techniques are refined, and the prices for buying gold online change, the items players trade also fluctuate in value.

Grinding for items vs getting them via luck doesn't really matter, because in both cases the item is rare and therefore valuable. How you get the item is irrelevant unless players stop farming them or they stop dropping. What matters is how many exist and how quickly they enter or exit the economy, not how they are obtained.

[Prestige]

i thought i read something about the economy being too focused on tf2 but i guess i made it up