Valve’s director of business management, Jason Holtman, has revealed that Steam sales does not cannibilize sales in any way, and also likened them to customer features.
“Actually, all the data is contrary to that. A promotion is not a policy; a promotion is just a feature to give people more value,” he told PC Gamer.
“It’s not as if a 75% offer or a 50% off sale at some point in time cannibalises a sale that would have happened earlier, it’s just not true. We’re actually seeing both of them growing. We don’t see one cannibalising the other. If we did, we wouldn’t do it.”
He said that if these sales were indeed hurting the revenue of the company, they wouldn’t do it.
“We put Left 4 Dead 2 and Portal 2 on sale. If we thought that was killing our franchise, or hurting the value of games, or hurting the revenue we could generate as a company, we wouldn’t do it. We’ve even gone so far as to give away Portal for free a couple of times,” he revealed.
“Whole days where it’s not free for a day, it’s just free.
“We looked at this amazing data afterwards. The day after the sales were exactly the same, if not more. We think of [sales as] customer features. They’re not policies or mandates.”
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