How exactly do they collect data on gamers' brainwaves?
I haven't seen any mention of valve doing this (tho that doesn't mean much as I'm not involved in the industry).
The only mention I've seen regarding valve and a psychologist is reports from
Newell's keyhnote address to DICE 2009 where he's been paraphrased as saying "Valve has hired an experimental psychologist to come up with new ways to excite users with pricing models and sales. He suggested one in 25 users that buy Left 4 Dead get another Valve game for free."
and from
another article on DICE 2009:
"Newell added that Valve has hired an experimental psychologist to explore more unconventional sales tactics. He joked that the move was “turning us to the dark side of B.F. Skinner...”
There are other interesting tidbits from these 2 reports:
"Valve aims to touch its customers in some way every three weeks, not every three years when a new game is shipped."
"As far as privacy goes, Gabe believes that people are willing to give up system and personal information if they feel it's being used to get a better service. Steam's hardware survey is an example of this. Rather than spying on users for nefarious reasons, Gabe believes things like its hardware survey helps with better sales of products and service. As long as companies are transparent, he feels that customers will accept this."
"By using the service’s strengths such as extensive data-mining capabilities, the company can be given a competitive advantage. Newell warned, however, that intrusive measures must be transparent and can be proven to give the customer better service or better games."
If he believes in transparency perhaps he'll tell us what specific personally identifiable information is collected, who it's shared with, and what uses it's put to.
"With Team Fortress 2, Valve shipped the game as a service and not a product."
"Right now, those two social networks [Facebook and MySpace] are sources of interesting features, but not quite right for a partnership currently."
"Perhaps Newell’s grandest vision of them all was the evolution of game companies into more general “entertainment companies.” He reckoned that most consumers were similar to Harry Potter fans, who are fans of the entire franchise and not just the books or just the movies. To that end, Newell intends to take Valve in the “entertainment” direction. The studio tested the waters with Team Fortress 2 animated shorts using the game’s characters. The house that made those shorts will be making TF2 comics in the near future, Newell announced."
"the winner of the next-generation console war won’t be whichever box has the best graphics, but rather which machine allows game companies “to have this relationship with your customers.”
And from
MTV Multiplayer:
"Video game companies acting as "entertainment companies": Newell said he is "obsessing" over gamers' expectations for "what kind of entertainment company they want us to be." They are fans of properties, not forms of entertainment, fans, to use his example, of Harry Potter, as opposed to just Potter books or just Potter movies. As a result, he said he is moving away from thinking of Valve as a video game company. One example is the introduction of "Team Fortress 2" video shorts made by Valve. The next will be that same team's "TF2" comics."
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Positive news:
"During the Holiday sales... At 75% off, they are making 15% more money than they were at full price."
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From all this it's clear that steam being required even for single-player offline Civ5 games isn't an 'accident', but it's the goal -- steam needs to be installed and running in the background as often as possible for valve's desired goals as described above -- extensive data-mining, offering us advertising as often as possible, 'touching' us at least every 3 weeks, becoming an 'entertainment company' not merely a video game company, and possibly a partnership with the likes of Facebook and MySpace someday.
Steam should just replace Windows for crying out loud.
