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:Finally

[FishWithAHammer]

Gabe's gone on record saying that if Valve went under, they'd release a patch to remove Steam checks on all games.

AFAIK Valve has no debt and it's also not a public company, so it'd be pretty difficult for a hostile takeover or receivership to happen. It's possible, but the chances are slim.

Re:GTA4

[FishWithAHammer]

You do realize that that was why Gabe's saying something like this, right? He has an obligation to his customers (who, for Steam, are the publishers--not you; you're the consumer, Steam's the delivery channel) to do what they want where it's reasonable. The customers want delayed releases, he loses business if he doesn't accept that.

But he's trying to change that. You should be cheering this on.

Re:Glad to see someone figuring it out

[deraj123]

6.) People who want to copy your games on a mass production scale and sell them, undercutting you significantly on price. These are the people, and the only people, that you should be using the law to go after.

Re:And Steam reflects that...

[Krovik]

ps3 games arent on piratebay because noone has figured how to break the ps3 encription yet, not because sony got anything right in their sales model. In fact MS was first with the DLC and minigames thing.

I would also argue that PS3 using BluRay for their games would have an impact on that as well, even if the encryption were broken. Speaking on behalf of myself anyways, burning dvds would be far cheaper and more convenient.

Re:Gabe Newell is a liar

[Atriqus]

The goldsrc engine was a heavily modified quake engine, and the source engine was a rewrite of the goldsrc engine. This is not news. Everyone knew that during the release of HL2. The only thing the code leak showed us was that Valve rewrote the engine by replacing the goldsrc engine piece by piece; something that Valve told the public even before the leak. So yes, Source is Valve's creation with a structure derived from the work at id.

And secondly, "Gabe Newell is a total programming novice"? I guess it does represent the legitimacy of your rant quite well.

Re:Hoping other media will follow suit

[Rhapsody Scarlet]

A wide selection of music, and more importantly, a wide selection of formats, from MP3, WAV, to OGG.

You'd have to be mad to insist on WAV, try for FLAC [sourceforge.net] instead. Typically compresses to 30-50% the size of WAV, the best hardware and software support of any lossless codec, can be tagged with Vorbis comments, and supports Replay Gain.

Also, the last codec you're thinking of is Vorbis. Ogg is a container format.

Spyro the dragon

[DreadPiratePizz]

The DRM in Spyro the Dragon kept the game from being pirated for literally months. There is an article at gamasutra about how they managed this. http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20011017/dodd_01.htm [gamasutra.com]

Re:but I refuse to buy Steam controled content

[Ihmhi]

You have the right of first sale on the disc itself and the license is fully transferable per the conditions you've listed. Damn near every EULA for the last 10 years has said that exactly. But again, you don't really own the game, just a revokable license to it.

Remember that people "own" their PSPs and iPhones, but God help them if they try to install non-Sony/Apple approved software on there.

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

Some examples of games having patches (official ones, of course) removing cd-check, out the top of my head:
- Supreme Commander
- Blizzard entire catalog (because it is available for download on their online store)
More would probably be found by searching wine's appdb (cd checks used to be showstoppers for wine, so very often official patches removing cd check are mentioned, if there is any).

Similarly, GOG.com [gog.com] sells "good old games" after getting original vendor's approval, and after removing all DRMs.

Re:Finally

[oracle128]

Bioshock took several weeks to crack.
Splinter Cell Chaos Theory took over a year.
CSS took 2.5 years.

For what it's worth, only legitimate bank users ever have to pay fees, while bank robbers don't ever have to pay a cent, yet that's hardly a great reason to support the robbing of banks. Not that, you know, simple logic would ever change your mind or anything...

Re:Finally

[severn2j]

I can name two.

TOCA Race Driver 2 took over a year to be cracked, but which time most people had either bought it or not bothered and moved onto something else..

The same thing happened with Soldiers: Heroes of WWII.

I believe both were using Starforce 3, back when it was new.