Even Valve can act shamefully

Via Hacker News I recently ran across a piece on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's site called First Sale Under Siege — If You Bought It, You Should Own It.

In the piece EFF explains the concept of "first sale":

…once you've acquired a lawfully-made CD or book or DVD, you can lend, sell, or give it away without having to get permission from the copyright owner. In simpler terms, "you bought it, you own it" (and because first sale also applies to gifts, "they gave it to you, you own it" is also true).

Publishers have always hated the first sale doctrine because it reduces their sales, but now with everything moving to digital formats they can act to prevent it. As EFF's piece explains, first sale is under siege because publishers are furiously working to abolish it.

Most gamers are aware of Valve's huge Steam Holiday Sale currently running through January 5th. Deep discounts are the major feature of this annual sale, commonly reaching 50% and often 75% or more.

In addition to buying a number of titles for myself, I also bought a number of gifts for my young relatives. I'd never used Steam for gifts before so I did some research on how it worked. In the process I came across this in the answer to What is a Steam Gift?

Also note that you may only gift new purchases—you may not transfer games you already own. That’d be like wrapping up and presenting the toaster you’ve used every morning for the past year.

Here we have a clear example of first sale being under siege. But more disappointing than Valve being the perpetrator is that the used toaster analogy is wrong and Valve knows it.

Of course real world items such as toasters show signs of wear as the result of being used. Toasters, in particular, readily show wear and accumulate crumbs and other dirt. Obviously a used toaster is less valuable than a new one of the same make and model.

Not only do digitally-distributed games not wear out, an infinite number of copies can be made of the original download. So the sentence should read "That’d be like wrapping up and presenting a clone of the toaster you have, in its original brand new state." But an accurate analogy wouldn't support Valve's argument.

If Valve permitted the gifting of used games it would incur costs both in processing the gift transaction and the bandwidth consumed by the recipient downloading the gift. Valve isn't concerned with recouping those costs, which are but a tiny fraction of the revenue received from a new sale. It wants to avoid the loss of income from a reduction of new sales.

Valve has been called out on this before; one instance is this November, 2011, thread on the Steam Users' Forums called Used toaster analogy is no good in this economic climate. As user puffincat points out, Valve could simply be honest about not wanting to suffer the lost sales.

In using an analogy that it knows to be inaccurate, Valve seeks to mislead its customers. This example shows that even a beloved company such as Valve is not above occasional shameful behavior.

[Update 12/28 15:03] Valve's broken analogy is not a mistake; it's broken for the purpose of shaping consumer behavior. Consider the other two ways Valve could have treated the analogy:

1. It could have replaced the analogy with an honest admission that Valve and the other publishers think that their sales will be higher by prohibiting the gifting or resale of used games.
2. It could have omitted the analogy, and prohibited gifting used games without any explanation.

The first option would likely cause some consumers to think of Valve and the other publishers as being greedy, which is not an image companies find useful to project. The second option would have little effect on consumer behavior. Instead Valve chose an inaccurate analogy regarding gifting used games:

That’d be like wrapping up and presenting the toaster you’ve used every morning for the past year.

Can you spot the subtle manipulation in this statement? It creates the idea of being someone so stingy that they'd give a used toaster as a gift. Most people will reject this idea since they don't wish to appear to be a cheapskate. This natural reaction to a concept most people find repellent serves to shape consumer behavior to Valve's benefit—gifting only new games.

There's a word that perfectly describes the inaccurate analogy:

propaganda, noun    Information, esp. of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.

Thanks to the commenters on Reddit who caused me to think further about the analogy and the point I'm making with this piece.

World of Tanks price list in dollars

World of Tanks is free to play with the option of spending money to buy gold coins. Since the store prices are listed in gold coins, it's not immediately obvious how much things really cost.

Below is a list of items purchasable in World of Tanks with prices converted to dollars.

First, the price of gold coins:

Gold	Dollars
1250	6.95
3000	14.95
6500	29.95
12000	49.95
25000	99.95

Premium subscription prices (five prices given, corresponding to the price of gold above):

Days	Gold	Dollars
1	250	1.00	1.04	1.15	1.25	1.39
3	650	2.60	2.71	2.99	3.24	3.61
7	1250	5.00	5.20	5.76	6.23	6.95
30	2500	9.99	10.41	11.52	12.46	13.90

Premium tanks (again, five prices given, corresponding to the price of gold in the first table):

Tier	Country	L/M/H	Tank	Gold	Dollars
2	US	L	T2 Light Tank	375	1.50	1.56	1.73	1.87	2.08
2	Ger.	L	PzKpfw 38H735 (f)	750	3.00	3.12	3.46	3.74	4.17
5	US	H	T14	750	3.00	3.12	3.46	3.74	4.17
5	US	M	Ram-II	875	3.50	3.64	4.03	4.36	4.87
4	Rus.	L	Valentine	1000	4.00	4.16	4.61	4.98	5.56
3	Ger.	M	PzKpfw S35 739 (f)	1000	4.00	4.16	4.61	4.98	5.56
4	Ger.	H	PzKpfw B2 740 (f)	1250	5.00	5.20	5.76	6.23	6.95
5	Rus.	M	Matilda	1500	6.00	6.24	6.91	7.47	8.34
5	Rus.	H	Churchill	1500	6.00	6.24	6.91	7.47	8.34
8	Rus.	H	KV-5	7500	29.98	31.22	34.56	37.37	41.70
8	Ger.	H	Lowe	7500	29.98	31.22	34.56	37.37	41.70

Other items sold in the store (again, five prices given, corresponding to the price of gold in the first table):

	Gold	Dollars
Demount a locked item	10	0.04	0.04	0.05	0.05	0.06
Consumable (Chocolate, etc.)	50	0.20	0.21	0.23	0.25	0.28
100% training for 1 crew	200	0.80	0.83	0.92	1.00	1.11
Exchange Gold for 100,000 credits	250	1.00	1.04	1.15	1.25	1.39
Slot	300	1.20	1.25	1.38	1.49	1.67
Convert 10,000 XP	400	1.60	1.67	1.84	1.99	2.22

Finally, let's say someone wanted get from tier 9 to 10 as quickly as possible. Assuming they had experience available, how much would it cost to convert the XP needed to reach tier 10 and buy the credits needed to purchase a tier 10 tank?

	Gold	Dollars
Convert 250,000 XP	10,000	39.98	41.63	46.08	49.83	55.60
Exchange Gold for 6,100,000 credits	15,250	60.97	63.48	70.27	76.00	84.79

Note that the 250,000 XP used above is an approximation; the actual amount of XP needed to reach tier 10 from tier 9 varies: 236,100 for US, 279,870 for German, and 311,415 for the Russian tech tree.

Return to WoW: First disappointment

WowAce Updater is gone. Bummer. My return to WoW starts on a down note and I haven't even logged in.

When I last played WoW I came to favor the WowAce mods. Unlike monolithic addon bundles such as Cosmos and CTMod, WowAce is a mix and match collection of addons. WowAce doesn't force an entire UI change on a player, instead you choose just the addons you want.

Another advantage of separate addons happens after patch days: a monolithic project often waits to release until all its components are updated, while individual addons allow you to install updates as they are released, so at least you have some functionality.

Back in the day, the WowAce Updater allowed one to pick the addons one wanted and it would install them while checking the dependencies to ensure you had the common libraries needed by the addons. It kept the addons up to date too, downloading new versions when needed. WowAce Updater simplified the whole issue of managing many individual addons down to just a few clicks. It was slick, and free.

And that was the problem. WowAce Updater (WAU) was so easy to use and good at its task that the bandwidth costs grew to exceed what the supporters of WowAce could afford. WowAce is a development community and repository, not a release site. So WAU was disabled and the Curse Client substituted instead.

Not only was WAU the better program, but the free version of Curse Client is both adware and crippleware. To even approach WAU's functionality with Curse Client one must be a Curse.com Premium member, at a base cost of $4.95/month. When I was actively playing Warhammer Online I used Curse Client for my addons. I went back recently to update them and first had to update Curse Client only to find that it no longer updates all addons with a single click. That feature has been moved behind the pay wall.

Finally I get to the point of this post: companies that leave in the hands of intermediaries aspects of a customer's experience that could easily be brought in-house. While outsourcing functionality often makes sense, the game industry has cases where the goals of game companies and their intermediaries aren't well aligned. Typically the intermediary's goal is to make a customer's experience worse before making it better.

Curse.com is making making the free Curse Client as bad as it can possibly get away with in order to maximize the contrast with the paid client. While this makes sense for Curse, it doesn't make sense for Blizzard. Blizzard would be well served to incorporate addon management functionality into its forthcoming improvements to Battle.net. This would provide support to all Blizzard's games and offer the best experience to customers at the lowest cost.

Game industry intermediaries whose revenue is derived from a two-tier scheme where bad service is free and good service requires a paid subscription have a problem: this isn't a viable long-term business model.