Gabe Newell has been bandying around theoretical new ways to pay for games on Steam for some time now. However, in a recent interview with Develop, he actually went as far as to say he would possibly entertain charging trolls and bad people more to play games.

Gabe Newell made the comments after stating that he felt existing payment models - such as monthly fees and microtransactions - "broken" and then went on to announce the new ways that Valve had looked at when it came to potential charges. This even included charging customers based on who the customers were.

Gabe Newell was quoted as saying:

The industry has this broken model, which is one price for everyone. That's actually a bug, and it's something that we want to solve through our philosophy of how we create entertainment products.

Some people, when they join a server, a ton of people will run with them. Other people, when they join a server, will cause others to leave.

So, in practice, a really likable person in our community should get DotA 2 for free, because of past behavior in Team Fortress 2. Now, a real jerk that annoys everyone, they can still play, but a game is full price and they have to pay an extra hundred dollars if they want voice.

Newell cited the examples of those players who had designed items for TF2 and had been paid royalties. As such they were earning money from the game despite not being Valve employess.

Whether or not this would ever be actioned though is another thing. What do you think?

Source: Develop