I just started reading up on the BitCoin infrastructure and it's quite fascinating. I have some education in economics, but economy is not my main field, so cut me some slack. From what I understand, this shouldn't be a problem and here's why I think so.
While what you're saying is true for "real" economy, it's quite different for BitCoin. When someone's suddenly dumping a lot of currency, greatly devaluating it, you have a reason to believe that this currency suddenly became less scarce. (Alchemists discovered a way to turn lead into gold, gold miners found rivers of gold, USA is printing dollars like there's no tomorrow, whatever.) So you want to get rid of the currency based on reasonable expectation, that it will never return to previous value and dumping it will provide you more benefit.
The key here is you predict the currency will *keep* devaluating until it's no longer useable. However with BitCoins you are not left in the dark and there's no central authority that can screw you up. You *know* the rate at which they are created, because it's governed by two unchangeable variables:
Furthermore there's a hard cap of 21 million BTC, so there's no way for someone to mint more than that.
Link on topic: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Deflationary_spiral
And FAQ: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ
For certain products, premium products are priced at a level (compared to "regular" or "economy" products) that is well beyond their marginal cost of production. Economists such as Tim Harford in the Undercover Economist have argued that this is a form of price discrimination.
1b) Regarding Valve: you give a discount to the segment that is fun. There are no rules you can't segment customers this way. While your goal isn't to cover more market with the highest possible price, this isn't a requirement of price discrimination (see the examples in the wikipedia link).
2) Your words:
the inventive structure might deter people from getting into these games because "well if I'm not good at it, I might end up paying more for other games I'm more interested in/better at"
No, you won't pay more for other games. You just won't pay less if you aren't fun to play with.
3a) Appeal to authority is not an argument. And if it was, it wouldn't be an argument you can win, when the original idea is by someone with much more authority than you.
3b) Commenting is not the kind of consideration I was talking about.
But if you ignore his "one price for everyone is a bug" idea, which is fucking stupid.
Micropayments have already proven to be a good way to get price discrimination. For example, check out what happened to Dungeons&Dragons Online after it went free-to-play with ability to buy extra content or eye candy. By giving customers a lot of payment strategies to choose from they managed to get a huge revenue increase. Here's a first link I googled out for you: Going Free Boosts Turbine's DDO Revenues 500 Percent. This is reality, not theory.
Suddenly you've invented an elaborate system, which might make less profit, and the inventive structure might deter people from getting into these games because "well if I'm not good at it, I might end up paying more for other games I'm more interested in/better at".
You're bashing a perfectly reasonable theory for *your* inability to see it implemented. They must love you at brainstorming sessions. All of the points you mentioned can be worked around. For example, you can have a per-game rating that can never get below 0, so there would be no point in avoiding a game.
There are plenty of games that are fun. It's not surprising, that there's a niche for games that are a sport.
Football, volleyball, tennis, etc. - all are both games and a sport. What's wrong with some computer games also being an eSport?
To write good code is a worthy challenge, and a source of civilized delight. -- stolen and paraphrased from William Safire