Valve's Gabe Newell On Piracy: It's Not a Pricing Problem

New submitter silentbrad writes with a followup to our discussion this morning about Ubisoft's claims of overwhelming game piracy. An article at IGN quotes a different point of view from Gabe Newell, CEO of Valve: "In general, we think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. For example, if a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the U.S. release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable. Most DRM solutions diminish the value of the product by either directly restricting a customers use or by creating uncertainty." The quote was taken from an interview at The Cambridge Student Online, in which Newell speaks to a few other subjects, such as creating games for multiple platforms and e-sports.

Re:I for one...

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one like brushing my teeth with dog-shit. It ensures that people I don't want to talk to avoid me. Dog shit also discourages plaque growth due to overwhelming levels of bacteria, and most people have teeth.

It's also a quality problem.

[billcopc]

One of the main reasons I'll download a cracked game is to try it out. Nobody releases demos anymore, and you can't trust reviews with all the goddamned shills out there. I did it for SC2, because I didn't know if it would be my thing. Well, sure enough I liked it, and bought it online the next day.

Case in point: Need For Speed - The Run. I knew it was coming from EA Black Box, responsible for all the "wigger" installments of the NFS franchise. Installed, played for about 10 minutes, deleted. Had I paid $70 for it, I would have put it in a box, shit on it, and Fedexed it to Trip Hawkins' home address with the note "Fixed it for you".

So, yes, Gabe is right, 'service" aka availability is a primary issue, and while price itself is not the most important factor, VALUE is. A staggering majority of major-brand games today lack value. They cost more than they're worth. In that sense, NFS The Run held very little value for me, because it's a shit game produced by a cut-rate studio and certainly does not belong in the same price bracket as, say, Skyrim, Arkham City or even F1 2011.

Re:Too true

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not one word, but rather an abbreviation. "FSCK" stands for "File System ChecK" and is the Unix and Unix-like operating systems' equivalent of the old SCANDISK.EXE for Windows. "Boring as fsck" means "as boring as watching the computer make slow progress through a file system check, methodically testing volume structures and clusters and blocks for errors." The fsck routine often requires unmounting a disk to perform maintenance, and the system may not be very interactive, and thus boring for the user, if the main system disk is unmounted. Less computer-literate people picked up this expression, but in a corrupt form, much as children may with error acquire knowledge from superior elders or barbarians may crudely imitate more civilized nations. Thus we find the underclass saying "boring as fuck" instead of "boring as fsck." The proliferation of this error points to a degeneration in society, an apostasy from the golden era in which Slashdotters ruled the world and a fall into one where the zombie-like hordes of HuffPo and FoxNews openly display their ignorance without the shame their ancestors would have rightly felt. You can help reverse that decline, however, and together we can take back our nation and our world, if you promulgate this truthful narrative of history to the more credulous of the savages.

Re:It's Just Wrong

[Squiddie]

But Jesus was the first pirate. He "copied" bread and fish for tons of people who wanted it. Doesn't that mean that good Christians should advocate sharing and copying, or as you refer to it, "piracy?"