Bill's Hat

[StaFForD]

If you pre-purchase L4D2, your TF2 account will get a new hat

http://tf2.com/post.php?id=3045

I still say screw that I'll wait for a while for the price to go down

[HENTAL1TY]

Already pre-ordered and got the hat! It's fucking sweeeet!

[Dominator]

Yea fuck that guy

[Creep Gnome]

Is Valve really that desperate for sales?

[Alfalfa]

Fuck you valve

Just...

Fuck you.

[Crit Goes Where?!?]

Is Valve really that desperate for sales?

That was my first impression too.  After giving it some more thought though, my conclusion REMAINED THE SAME.

[Dominator]

I'm stupid with

<-----

[Dominator]

fuck..

[Dr.BlackDick]

Bill's Hat

[Benny Burnsalot]

Is Valve really that desperate for sales?

Yeah, i thought that too, don't worry, !equip is on our side

[somerandomegirl]

Is Valve really that desperate for sales?

Yeah, i thought that too, don't worry, !equip is on our side

!equip benny hat

[Dark_Stool]

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The idea, from a marketing standpoint, is good. bill's hat... hilarious!

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[Crit Goes Where?!?]

From a marketing stand point, it seems rather desperate to me.  It would make sense if they gave you something incredibly awesome for l4d2 (bat no count since its just a bat), but instead its for another game altogether.  "Buy our game! We'll give you stuff for an even better game if you do"

[Dark_Stool]

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The idea of marketing is to promote interest in your product. For a business to succeed it needs to maximize profits.  The way you do this is through promotion & incentives. You market broadly to non-customers (% off), and more specifically to your existing customer base.

The Valve market is made up of segments, and Valve will market specifically to those segments. For example: To their base of l4d customers they promoted the limited baseball bat as an incentive to pre-purchase; to their base of TF2 customers - a new hat. Since Valve already has a successful base of customers within the TF2 community, it makes perfect marketing sense to appeal to that market segment by offering them something that a large portion of them values.

If you don't value the hat, that's fine... because they aren't selling a hat, they are selling Left4Dead2 and using the hat as incentive to pre-order. Pre-orders give the company more capital to work with to market more effectively to the larger segments; which, hopefully, will maximize their profit. The better they do at maximizing their profit, the more freedom the shareholders will give them in doing things like giving us "free" content in TF2.

To us on the receiving end, the update content is free, but to Valve it costs them the salary of the Team of people who are working almost exclusively on updates for a game we already purchased (some of us in 2007!). The only way that Valve will be able to continue to do that is by proving to their shareholders that maintaining a healthy & growing online experience for the TF2 community will, in-turn, influence their buying decisions with future products.  Why were they allowed to sell TF2 for $2.50? Because it is a sure way for them to broaden their marketing base to a segment in-which they already have a strategy to influence their buying decisions.

Valve cannot continue to give out non-stop free content without the company collapsing... they need to make a profit to pay for the development of their existing games as well as the development & marketing of future games. This means, from time to time they will use incentives to try to sell us things...

It's only desperate in the terms that Valve wants to be a successful company without sacrificing providing free content to the community. If L4D2 is a complete financial flop, do you think it will continue to be free updates as usual for TF2? No.

It's bill's hat in tf2.
bill's.
that's funny.

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[Creep Gnome]

From the blog...

And lest you think this is just some marketing gimmick, here's the intricate back-story justifying it: while conducting a science experiment on parallel dimensions, Bill's hat fell off a table into the Team Fortress universe.

Yeah, it seems pretty desperate. They went out of their way to remind you that it isn't a marketing gimmick, and made up a pretty crappy, not-believable-even-by-tf2-standards 'story' for it.

[Dark_Stool]

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From the blog...

And lest you think this is just some marketing gimmick, here's the intricate back-story justifying it: while conducting a science experiment on parallel dimensions, Bill's hat fell off a table into the Team Fortress universe.

Yeah, it seems pretty desperate. They went out of their way to remind you that it isn't a marketing gimmick, and made up a pretty crappy, not-believable-even-by-tf2-standards 'story' for it.

wow. you're lack of sense of humor is staggering.

So what would you be doing if Valve was your company? How would you market to your customer base? obviously, you would skip the "give them free items as incentives" as that would look too desperate, and you would also make sure to update your blog with straight-shooting, no nonsense posts so that people would understand how serious your work really is.  But what else would you do?

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[WhosDelicious?]

So what would you be doing if Valve was your company? How would you market to your customer base? obviously, you would skip the "give them free items as incentives" as that would look too desperate, and you would also make sure to update your blog with straight-shooting, no nonsense posts so that people would understand how serious your work really is.  But what else would you do?

Great question that wasn't directed at me.  Regardless of that fact, I shall answer:

I tell ya what I would do.  I would make it an option, for people who didn't want to wait for a certain hat to drop, to buy the hat of their choice for $9.99.  I guarantee you they'd make an easy $500,000 off that.

I wouldn't charge for anything that affected how well you do in combat, but I'd charge the hell out of people for cosmetic stuff.

I would keep giving people free updates such as maps and halloween stuff and generally try to keep it fun.

Also I would begin working on TF3 and spending the majority of my resources there.  It would be am mmorpg like world of warcraft where items dropped etc, you could customize how your character looked etc.  Going into servers would not be selecting from a list, it would be like walking through a town and whichever building you walked into that's what server you went to. 

So let's say you love 2 fort, head to the 2 fort area, enter the zone and BANG you are in a 24 person server. 

I would charge $9.99 a month (so instead of charging $20 once, I'd charge $9.99 - PEOPLE WOULD PAY THIS FOR SURE) the company would become amazingly rich like all the world of warcraft people.  There would be ladders so you could see how good you are compared to EVERYONE in the WORLD - awesome.

Right now I think Valve is testing the waters to see how much they can blur a FPS with an RPG and it is working.


Also - I would give a raise to whoever came up with the Bill's hat idea.

[WhosDelicious?]

Also - I would implement an in-game team system where you could create a 6 person team or a 9 person highlander team

The game would manage your teams ranking and you could play similarly skilled people.

I would also reveal that the pyro is a woman.

[WhosDelicious?]

Apparently world of warcraft has the same idea - they are now charging real money for in-game pets.

Dude, I know people would pay serious cash for a robot or dog buddy for the engineer alone.

http://www.wow.com/2009/11/04/blizzard-launches-real-money-in-game-pet-store/