Valve Takes Optimistic View of Piracy

GameDaily recently spoke with Jason Holtman, director of business development and legal affairs for Valve, about online sales and piracy. Holtman took a surprising stance on the latter, effectively taking responsibility for at least a portion of pirated games. Quoting: "'There's a big business feeling that there's piracy,' he says. But the truth is: 'Pirates are underserved customers. When you think about it that way, you think, "Oh my gosh, I can do some interesting things and make some interesting money off of it." We take all of our games day-and-date to Russia,' Holtman says of Valve. 'The reason people pirated things in Russia,' he explains, 'is because Russians are reading magazines and watching television — they say "Man, I want to play that game so bad," but the publishers respond "you can play that game in six months...maybe." We found that our piracy rates dropped off significantly,' Holtman says." Attitudes like this seem to be prevalent at Valve; last month we talked about founder Gabe Newell's comments that "most DRM strategies are just dumb."

Re:Should EA Games take over Valve...

[philspear]

And he'll have to start working on "Halflife 2009." The hard part will be working the in-game ads into the plot. "Gordon, you've saved city 18, have a coke!"

Re:Finally

[flyingsquid]

As an underserved customer, I'm glad that Valve is taking this move and I hope other companies will follow. However, they are still underserving one important segment of the market. And that's the one I belong to: people who want to get things without paying for them. I think that if Valve made a serious effort to cater to us by not charging money for their games, they would see their piracy rates drop almost to zero.

Re:Finally

[Urza9814]

And people like me, who don't play games online because we will get our asses handed to us, can continue pirating without any problems :)

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

And they you'd get you ass sued. EA, please make a game that will steal my credit card information, I could use a new house.

Re:TV

[Xelios]

The reason I download TV shows is because here in Germany, when they finally air 6+ months later, they sound like this. [youtube.com] Or this. [youtube.com]

Re:Finally

[ubrgeek]

> When you played chess for the first time you probably lost badly.

Nah, I did pretty well.

Sincerely,
Deep Blue

Re:Same day release and appropriate pricing

[plasmacutter]

Actually it's highly variable, but the results of bad subs are a whole new product in and of themselves.

7 years ago my friend ordered vandread dvd's from a dodgy HK dealer and we ended up with completely incongruous subtitles.

"it's not gasco, it's gascogne" turns into "need more gas, pump in the gas!"

I bought those versions off him and find them more entertaining than the fansubs were (story was too shounen for my taste)

Re:Finally

[hab136]

Steam is pants. Don't buy pants.

I tried this strategy, but it's been a chilly winter..