Valve: Pirates are our friends
"Undeserved customers" mean potential customers, says director
The Game Business Law summit this week saw Valve's Jason Holtman -- director of business development and legal affairs -- speaking openly about many topics, including the amount of PC gamers out there (255 million new PCs bought in 2007 isn't something to ignore), retail versus online sales (retail still beats out online, at least sometimes), but the always fun issue to talk about is piracy.
On this Holtman revealed he looks as pirates as his friends more than his enemies when it comes to their worldwide PC game service Steam:
"There's a big business feeling that there's piracy," he says. But the truth is: "Pirates are undeserved 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. The reason people pirated things in Russia 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.' "
They found piracy rates dropped off significantly following this approach, which shows many people want to pay, but feel they aren't getting what they should (i.e. timely releases).
Steam currently boasts 15 million gamers, lending it a sizeable chunk of the PC gaming sector's sales.
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I want to play the game that is getting these awesome reviews...damn they don't have it here yet...why not download it then!?!?!?!
Same goes for demo-less games I would assume, which is why Steam is so awesome. They have hundreds of demos available, but for those epic looking games with so-so reviews, I would assume that some percentage of people would want to try before buying and without a demo they can't do that. Alternative: pirate the game to try it out, not the right thing but the easiest thing for those people.
Way I figure it overall Steam is worse than retail for DRM..at least some retail games have neither SecuROM nor some form of online activation. I think people just love Valve so much they overlook a lot of stuff. Pretty whack.
The Steam client application's files must be updated to allow for the use of Offline Mode. If your game's status is "100% - Ready" but you receive the message "This game cannot be started in Offline Mode" when attempting to play offline, the Steam client application's files need to be updated.
Please note that you must connect to the Steam Network and test each of the games you would like to use in Offline Mode at least once to set up your account and configure Offline Mode on your machine.
I also found that Far Cry 2, although it is protected by Steam, does not allow you to log in from 2 different computers. They require you to uninstall from one PC to be able to use it on another. That's just play silly too, since Steam effectively eliminates the problem of two people playing the same copy at the same time. To me this seems like publishers that go BEYOND simply using Steam authentication as their DRM model is a much bigger issue.
A nice improvement however would be semi-offline support, where you're on a PC that is already verified by Steam in the past, so it should allow you to play offline for a certain period of time without connecting to Steam at all.
I personally haven't had a problem with Steam aside from the recent TF2 server maintenance which overhauled how the online server seeking system works.
Although I do agree that Steam games that you buy in the shops are annoying to play if you don't have an internet connection, I used to hate Steam when I first bought HL2 because it just seemed to infest my computer and added an extra thing to load before I could play my game. I love Steam now, it's got a lot of games on it so it isn't a waste of space and it has just allowed me to install a whole lot of my games on my new laptop without me being at home.
But it does not really work for me cause pirating games is really bad.And illegal.
Dont mean to suck the life out of everything, but yes, I understand his point. Its just like, what if I have a laptop with Steam on it, and I want to take it on a business trip for example and play my Steam games on it, but don't have an Internet connection? Its likely I cant do that, which I should be able to if I paid $60 for the freaking thing.
If it was just a natural requirement of the service, yes, I wouldnt care, but theres a difference between that and restricting your customers usage with what you sell them (DRM). It should be theirs once you sell it to them, not something still under your control, in that sense.
I personally haven't tried this, but couldn't you "log on" to Steam and set it to offline and play your games that way?
And depending on how much of an online gamer you are, you could get a wireless internet card (the AT&T sort) for your laptop.
Wireless internet isn't everywhere. And what about when the Internet goes down? Especially wireless, this happens all the time..
Point is..minimal restrictions, if any. Not into it personally.