Slashdot Mirror
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."
Steam allows you to get content online. They are leading the charge to remove boxes from shelves. Today there was mass chaos at some Circuit City stores, because their CEO ran that company into the ground and won the worst CEO of 2008 award - Philip Schoonover, possibly the worst businessman in retail history. And that's saying something.
Next up is Best Buy - do you really need to travel there to pick up a disk to have a game anymore? No.
Sony kinda gets it, you can download some games with a PS3 that are fun, esp. for little kids, without needing to go get something. Pretty soon all the consoles will realize the revenue stream in controlling the distribution channel for all software via broadband.
Do that, tie it to reasonable encryption keys, and alot of piracy will go away. PS3 games aren't up on piratebay for a reason, while Xbox games are. Just make it available, and make it easy - to the world, and the internet will take care of it. The loss of sales via the retail front won't be as bad as the suits fear, and mail-order is always available for the PC gamer living in an Igloo.
That's all great, but it's just words. On the other hand, when I wanted to buy GTA4 on Steam from Russia, I found out that the release was North America only (and despite this, I've got bombarded by ads urging me to preload and save, etc - all also NA-specific). After seeing the ads and the trailers, I really wanted to have that game, and getting such a slap in the face on release date was... very unpleasant. I immediately went and downloaded it from the torrent, and I am not going to pay for it anymore. I wanted to in the first place, but they said "no, we won't let you". So be it, then.
I guess it's publisher policy really, not Valve, but still, Steam is and will be associated with Valve first and foremost, so maybe they should clean that mess up before speaking on this. Once I've got burned, I looked around, and I've found that there are many other games that are similarly released first only in North America, and then gradually elsewhere. There's even a Steam group, "Rest of World", that's dedicated to this problem, with over 10,000 members.
Then why don't they get rid of DRM after those few weeks? That would be a reasonable compromise for me: "You will need to activate this game and it will connect to our servers until 1/6/09. After that period the game will not need an internet connection, or the CD to be in the drive".
Now, I would wait for the set date before purchasing anyway, but that's better (for them) than never buying the game no matter what.
PS.1. Yes, I know that DRM removal tools exist.
PS.2. The real date can be checked from trusted time servers.
My sister tried that with DVDs of the West Wing she got on ebay. They were pretty low quality, bad Aspect Ratio, and half of the last episode on each disc was cut off. The bitrate was awfully low, trying to crap 6 episodes per single layer DVD. Spelling errors all over the otherwise decent looking counterfeit packaging.
So often with the counterfeit DVDs, quality issues can arise. It seems like a much better idea, rather than to import illegal/stolen goods, to do the piracy yourself. Then you could control the quality of the DVDs made from the source files, and it would cost nearly nothing.
I've purchased all my valve games irrispective of steam simply because they are good games, worth the money you pay for them, and i want to support the company that made them.
Perhaps valve's secret to not having a large amount of piracy was to charge $20 for portal, and $80 for the orange box, both of which were easly worth that money. Another company would of said "portal is popular, $80 if you want it", at which point a significant group of people would say "i'm not paying $80 for a 4 hour game" and go pirate it.
I do download games from time to time, but anything which manages to keep my attention beyond the first few times i play it, i pay for.
I can really see how that shit contributes to the much larger copying numbers that seem to come out of countries other than the US and Canada. Living here, you kinda forget about it. Almost all media is available immediately. You forget that there are people where that isn't the case. I certainly can empathize with them when they say "To hell with you," and copy it.
I actually ran in to a situation like that. I stumbled across a little French cartoon on the web called Minuscule. It is a bunch of 5 minute shorts of silly anthropomorphic 3D rendered insects, blended with real backgrounds. Superb job very entertaining. Despite being done in France, there's no speech so no translation is necessary. I figured this is the sort of thing that would just delight my mother. Thus I set about buying it.
Well no US stores carried it. I figured this was probably because they don't have an NTSC version, but that is kinda silly. There are plenty of DVD players, including mine, that can do PAL to NTSC in real time. Also a computer has no problems playing either, since they operate on different refresh rates anyhow. So I decided ok, I'll just order it from France. Shipping is going to be hell but whatever. I go to their site and fill out everything. All the fields are in French so I have to use a translator program to understand what they want. Get to the end and it says It'll be like 10 Euro for the disc and 20 Euro shipping. Ouch, but worth it. I say "Ok make it happen." Then the first time anything in English comes up, it's a notice that says "Sorry, we aren't allowed to sell to that country."
I was more than a little miffed. Here I was trying to give them money for their product, and they wouldn't take it because of some bullshit over where they were willing to distribute.
Well, I can see anyone having to deal with that crap on a regular basis turning to copying quite often. You want their product, you want to pay for it. However they don't want to take your money. Ok, fine, you take the product and don't give them money. Their loss for being stupid.