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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."
yay! I win! or lose i guess...
There wasn't any communism in the Europe (or any other part of the world), ever. There was a totalitarian regime under the "cover" of socialism, and you can consider yourself a lucky bastard if you weren't born in a "communist" (or post-communist) country.
Communism itself (share everything with everyone) is a great idea, but the implementation sucked donkey balls. I see that the current implementation of western democracy-capitalism is slowly turning and taking the same path, though (financial/economical cataclism, totalitarianism, etc). Someone said that democracy is the second worst scheme ever, the first being everything else; I agree, but am still curious: where are we going to go from here when democracy/capitalism also fails (and I'm sure it will).