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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."
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.
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 :)
The reason I download TV shows is because here in Germany, when they finally air 6+ months later, they sound like this. Or this.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
> When you played chess for the first time you probably lost badly.
Nah, I did pretty well.
Sincerely,
Deep Blue
Bark less. Wag more.
I tried this strategy, but it's been a chilly winter..