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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."
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.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
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