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Gabe said that just the additional email they received over a few days cost them a million: "That's like 1% of the cost of the incremental email the program has
by morsch 12y ago
Gabe said that just the additional email they received over a few days cost them a million: "That's like 1% of the cost of the incremental email the program has generated for Valve employees (yes, I mean pissing off the Internet costs you a million bucks in just a couple of days)."
That seemed preposterous to me. It can't be the additional hardware expenses to store/process the mail, those are negligable. I suppose it's simply the time the support staff have to spend to weed out all the irate mails. But can that really amount to a million dollars? Existing solutions for combating spam must be sufficient to classify those mails and throw them away or send out the boilerplate message the support staff would have sent otherwise.
- reitanqild 12y ago> Existing solutions for combating spam must be sufficient to classify those mails and throw them away or send out the boilerplate message the support staff would have sent otherwise. Except maybe (I haven't tried contacting them) Valve isn't the kind of company that annoys customers even more by bulk classifying their mails and sending generic spam back?
- Lockyy 12y agoWell based on their support system I would be surprised if they were opposed to sending out automated messages on principle. From what I've heard however the emails may have been answerable/seen by non-support within the company meaning expensive developer time may have been used on reading and replying to emails.
- speeder 12y agoThe thing is: Gabe Newell put his personal e-mail account on some games (I remember seeing it in HL2), and promised to read all those he can, even if he does not reply... I think that mass deleting e-mails would be noticed by the people e-mailing Gabe...
- josefresco 12y agoI don't think Gabe's response was the result of a thorough financial analysis or specifically limited to just the costs of email. He probably did some "napkin" math and thought "shit, this probably cost us $1 mil when you add it all up"
- astrodust 12y agoThey make a lot of money from casual purchases of in-game items and the games themselves. Every day someone's too irate to purchase something is lost revenue. It probably hit them harder than that, it'll take time to see what kind of a dent sales in add-ons have taken. Honestly, I thought it was a good idea, funding mod makers to do even better work directly, but maybe they should've stuck to a new game to launch that idea rather than push it back into existing titles where people might get miffed their formerly free mods go paid.
- detrino 12y agoIt's probably just a PR move. By pretending to have been financially hurt by this campaign they both stroke the ego of the internet gaming crowd and make it seem that they have been sufficiently punished.
- caractacus 12y agoQuite. There's nothing quantifiable in what gaben said but a statement like this is more than enough to have that million dollar figure quoted and re-quoted in discussions about poor gaming company decisions, how to cut losses, the right way to respond, etc.
- drzaiusapelord 12y agoThis is probably a back of the napkin calculation of future lost sales and other actions. I could see it adding up to a large number. Valve really is not in a great position now considering the success of Origin and how current and future version of Windows will make further use of the MS store to sell software.
- delecti 12y agoA lot of that cost is probably in refunds. They're refunding purchasers of mods, but presumably they're not taking money away from mod makers. That would be 25% of the mod costs that they're eating. I doubt they sold $4m in mods in two days, but that plus other costs makes $1m seem plausible.
- Rooster61 12y agoIt isn't just the time spent sorting/filtering hate emails. It's the impact of time passing on issues in legitimate emails that is wasted. Running a platform on the web that has as large a scope as Steam does is incredibly tenuous (ask anyone that works on SaaS applications), and if you aren't efficiently getting the info you need from outside to identify and fix these issues, then you are going to lose money when those issues inevitably make an impact on functionality. Downtime = lost money A million is a pretty ass-pull number in an offhand comment, but it wouldn't surprise me if it rang true.
- BananaRepub 12y agoSeems about right, you have to tally up the entire economic cost. Salary costs of everyone handling this issue, the cost of them not performing other tasks due to handling this issue, it is not just weeding through emails. I've been in an 2 hour long meeting with 8 people who are effectively paid $400hr to talk about how to handle a $58 fee.