Andre Yoskowitz
30 May 2008 14:26
Valve president Gabe Newell took the time to talk out about the "threat" of piracy in the PC Market recently, and had some interesting things to add on that matter.
"When you list the things that we worry about in our business, piracy is not one of them," he told the audience when piracy was brought up.
His statements differ from that of many large publishers, who for the most part feel piracy is killing acceptable profit margins in the PC gaming business. Newell feels that Valve's Steam platform is mostly protected from piracy.
"We've got great facilities that make it very hard for people to pirate. And more importantly, the service value of having an ongoing relationship with us is high enough that it causes people to not be very interested in piracy.
"It's a dangerous thing to pirate one of our games because later on, when we catch you, you lose all your games, or you can't play multiplayer."
Before Newell came up, Valve's Jason Holtman was asked how he felt about the rampant piracy in emerging markets such as Russia and China. He felt those fears were misplaced and the problems could be fixed rather easily.
He added that Valve solved the problem of international piracy by releasing their games simultaneously worldwide, unlike most publishers which release the games up to six months later in markets outside of Western Europe and the US.
"We know that that's the major place where this rampant piracy myth comes from," Holtman said speaking of Russia. "Rampant piracy is just unserved customers."
"Russians have money, Russians like to play games and Russians have PCs. They love going to stores and not having to use Bittorrent sties."