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."
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.