Here's a unique story: gamer e-mails company president about Digital Rights Management (DRM), company president...responds? Well, it happened, and with the president of Valve no less, Gabe Newell. The fact its Valve is significant for two reasons: 1) most everyone loves Valve, and 2) Valve runs Steam, the leading digital distribution platform for PC games or some such thing, which utilizes DRM.

Paul Reisinger, the gamer, stated in his e-mail he loves Valve's games, but upon noticing Electronic Arts (notorious for its extensive DRM) was affiliated with Left 4 Dead, he wasn't sure what was up and if he could allow himself to buy the game, so as not to give money to EA (that's the short version, anyway), to which Newell responded promptly:

Hi, Paul.

Left 4 Dead is developed entirely by Valve. Steam revenue for our games is not shared with third parties.

Around the world we have a number of distribution partners to handle retail distribution of our games (i.e. make discs and boxes). EA is one of those partners.

As far as DRM goes, most DRM strategies are just dumb. The goal should be to create greater value for customers through service value (make it easy for me to play my games whenever and wherever I want to), not by decreasing the value of a product (maybe I'll be able to play my game and maybe I won't).

We really really discourage other developers and publishes from using the broken DRM offerings, and in general there is a groundswell to abandon those approaches.

Gabe

As you may know, many games on Steam utilize SecuROM, online activation, etc. So when the company's president says he hates it, well, that's awesome. Obviously these things are contradicting, and it's easy to yell at folks like Newell (as gamers have been doing over on the GamePolitics version of this tale), but I like to think he's being truthful, and that, in fact, it's not so black and white.

For instance, Impulse, Stardock's content delivery service, is known by many to be DRM-free. Yet the company has a title up on its own website with SecuROM in it. Sure it tells you it has SecuROM (which is very nice of them), but nevertheless, it's confusing to the gamer who cares about this sort of stuff, as the company is known to be essentially against it. I've seen similar happenings with The Witcher. Made by CD Projekt Red, this company is directly affiliated with Good Old Games, another platform which sells DRM-free titles. The Witcher, however, has TAGES copy protection (nasty stuff which deletes NPCs and such things to prevent you from progressing in the game, something which has been problematic for paying customers). A little disturbed by this, I sent my own message to GOG, inquiring. This was their response:

Good observation. Creators of the Witcher - CDPRed have a publishing deal with Atari and although there were discussions, they did not manage to get a DRM-free version out so far. Still, they are working on it and hopefully in near future there will be a DRM-free version. We would love to have it on GOG.com one day, but we will have to let it age a bit ;)

I could've just assumed they were hypocritical jerks, but it's not that black and white and rarely seems to be. So in the case of Valve and Newell, again, I like to think he's being truthful. Let's just hope the changes most gamers want come sooner rather than later.

In any case, gamers and lawyers alike are banding together to take back their computers, so to speak, which is good to know. How often is it you hear a lawyer speak honestly, and you agree with them?