March 19th 2013 6:43 am PT

Good to know more UGS are in the works I got a bunch of games in the last one, having said that the Deal of the Week really needs to improve. You know permanently reducing the price of old content instead of putting the same content on sale over and over again (like GTA last week and Ubisoft content this week as well as the constant Bethesda, Borderlands and Bioshock sales) would go a long way in instilling my faith in Xbox’s digital future.

As it stands I feel like the deals team is kind of hit and mostly miss. Every once in a while we get great deals (like the Countdown to 2013 and UGS), but most of the time it feels like we get rehashed content. I believe I suggested this before, but I feel like the following method would work better:

1. After 3 to 4 months, put the game on sale for 50%.
2. After 6 to 8 months, permanently reduce the item by 25%.
3. After a year or so, permanently reduce the title to 50% off the original price.
4. Maybe after 2 years have a sale that reduces the item to 25% its original price.
5. After 3-4 years, permanent reduction to 25% of original price.

How this improves on the current method:

1. You are putting the same items “on sale” about the same number of times as you currently are now, but you are (hopefully) reducing complaints because the amount you reduce the item by increases each time.
2. You are advertising the item each time it drops and (as you may have noticed with the ultimate game sale) the lower items get, the more likely you are to sell them i.e. impulse buys (e.g I never would have picked up Call of Juarez or Rainbow 6 if they didn’t drop down to $5, plus I also convinced my friends to buy them and some other games).
3. Since you are mixing permanent reductions with sales, the games don’t appear in DotW as often as they currently are, which would hopefully be another reason that complaints go down.
4. You are more closely following the retail model which shows consumers that digital media is on par (if not superior) to their physical counterpart. For me personally, this would help convince me to purchase the next Xbox since I would see that Microsoft was not trying to monopolize prices on the Xbox Live Marketplace and was reasonable in their pricing schemes. As it stands, Steam looks like they have that down, so a Steam Box might be a more viable option for me next gen or (as I have mentioned previously) the Wii U seems tempting because I haven’t played Nintendo games in a while.

Now Major (if you’ve gotten this far), I know others have expressed interest in helping out on this matter, but I haven’t yet so here’s my offer: summer is fast approaching and so, if it is even still viable, I would not mind taking on an internship with the “deals team” to work on some predictive modeling to see whether or not my ideas would actually generate more revenue. My undergraduate degree was in Mathematics and Computer Science and I have a Master’s degree in Computer Science (with an emphasis in Control Theory). I am currently working on my PhD and some experience in industry doing predictive modeling would be great for me, not to mention more revenue from sales would be great for you. If anything, I would at least work to ease complaints by not putting the same things on sale all the time. If this proposition interests you (and is feasible) please feel free to contact me: chettyv at byu dot edu, I can provide my resume and letters of recommendation if necessary.

So, where is your corporate sponsored DOTW post?

It isn’t like it is your job or anything.