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Valve talks out about PC game piracy

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DVDBack23 @ May 30, 2008 18:26 | 18 comments

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."

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Comments

Comment by: iluvendo (May 30, 2008 19:07)

Refreshing philosophy !!!

Comment by: LILBUCK (May 30, 2008 19:13)

"Russians have money, Russians like to play games and Russians have PCs. They love going to stores and not having to use Bittorrent sties." I have family that lives in the Ukraine and my cousin from Kiev said that there are more "knock offs" there than the real deal.
Wow, after the statements Gabe made, If I owned stock in the STEAM company I'd sell right away.

Comment by: gokou135 (May 30, 2008 19:23)

Gabe is 100% correct. Valves business practices and Steams architecture have proven time and time again that their efforts to battle piracy are working better than any DRM or other form of piracy protection.

Sure you can crack steam games and force the games to believe they are connecting to a steam network server even though the arent. But a lot of steams games just aren't fun without online play

Comment by: oappi (May 30, 2008 20:36)

Cool thing about steam is that you dont have to make backup´s from your game cd:s since you can always download the game from their servers. I for one just hated to search my game disks after i havent played the game in a year. Valve seems to be the only company who is getting it. They should only use DRM when it doesn´t effect on customeror if it does give something for return. Unfortunately steam requires internet connection. This means that if your or their internet is down you wont be able to login to steam and play. steam seems to be down about once a year (because they upgrade servers) so thats not a big deal if you have somewhat reliable isp. Games also seem to be cheaper. I got my orange box cheaper than what i would have paid for tf2 on store. Also i got to buy o box before tf2 hit the stores and play half life2 and it´s episodes while i w8 for tf2.

Comment by: varnull (May 30, 2008 20:43)

Yeah... these guys have got it right. Top marks. I love the way we could crack the orange box and play it on any damn platform we wanted, and valve helped us... keep going dudes.. when you release your first truly open source game you will get $25 from me.. just because.

Free open source software = made by end users who want an application to work.... #1 image again.. check it out ;)

Comment by: xSModder (May 30, 2008 21:44)

good thing Portal is single player, i might've "missed out"

Comment by: veyron (May 30, 2008 22:05)

Anyone seen this yet? I can see it stopping people who buy "bundled PC's". But, I cant imagine buying a motherboard with this chip on it.

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/52841

Comment by: ZippyDSM (May 30, 2008 23:58)

Originally posted by varnull:
Yeah... these guys have got it right. Top marks. I love the way we could crack the orange box and play it on any damn platform we wanted, and valve helped us... keep going dudes.. when you release your first truly open source game you will get $25 from me.. just because.

oh?

BTW they finially did something aobut offline mode you have to set it to offline mode for it to work offline you can just pull the plug, offline mode and spying on which you can opt out of were my 2 main concerns for steam, i still think they need to do more to have to easier to setup in offline mode tho.

Comment by: engage16 (May 31, 2008 00:49)

I have no issues with the way Steam runs and operates, my one problem is that whenever you install a game it sits there and downloads updates. Me personally, I'm stuck on a slow internet connection so it takes several hours anytime I install a game off my copy of The Orange Box. Otherwise I have not a single complaint with Valve and their anti-piracy methods.

Comment by: ZippyDSM (May 31, 2008 01:00)

Originally posted by engage16:
I have no issues with the way Steam runs and operates, my one problem is that whenever you install a game it sits there and downloads updates. Me personally, I'm stuck on a slow internet connection so it takes several hours anytime I install a game off my copy of The Orange Box. Otherwise I have not a single complaint with Valve and their anti-piracy methods.

the lock on updates is a anti piracy method.
they should handle updates in a separate process of the team,should be easily pausalbe and resumable as well.

Comment by: engage16 (May 31, 2008 01:06)

It just sucks that if I want to play HL2 and I have to sit through an hour of updates before I get to play...

Comment by: ZippyDSM (May 31, 2008 01:09)

Originally posted by engage16:
It just sucks that if I want to play HL2 and I have to sit through an hour of updates before I get to play...

They need to refine the whole steam process, offline mode is is seamless with online mode, after activation is it cannot find the steam severs it shouldn't lock up or go buggy, if you want a update slot it like a download manager this all can be done in the steam app, it can the game can run at the same time,updates can be applied once the download is completed and you are ready to update date it.

Comment by: drach (Jun 01, 2008 01:43)

Quote:
Cool thing about steam is that you dont have to make backup´s from your game cd:s since you can always download the game from their servers.

I agree with that 100%!

Quote:
It just sucks that if I want to play HL2 and I have to sit through an hour of updates before I get to play...

I just installed the orange box yesterday, and i only had to update steam, nothing else. The whole install/update process took about 20 or 25 minutes.

Comment by: engage16 (Jun 01, 2008 02:00)

Originally posted by drach:
I just installed the orange box yesterday, and i only had to update steam, nothing else. The whole install/update process took about 20 or 25 minutes.

Its no issue if your on DSL or Cable, but if your on dialup, like I am, then there becomes an issue. It takes too damn long to install needless updates on a 31.2kb/s connection. I'd have no problem having to be connected to verify my account and serial key when installing the game, except for the part of forced updates. Luckily after you first install and update the games you can choose to disable autoupdating for the future.

Comment by: max777 (Jun 02, 2008 15:38)

"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."

THIS DOES HAPPEN - THEY WILL LOCK GAMES YOU PAID FOR! HAHA!

Comment by: ZippyDSM (Jun 02, 2008 15:40)

Originally posted by max777:
"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."

THIS DOES HAPPEN - THEY WILL LOCK GAMES YOU PAID FOR! HAHA!

Be funny if they whacked a game or account over the use of legal cracks and what not.

Besides why use the account setup of you have a steamless rip 0-o

Comment by: cursh (Jun 03, 2008 15:48)

I like Valve alot cause Gabe Newell and his staff think outside the box.

Comment by: Lee_asdf (Jun 12, 2008 08:47)

Originally posted by gokou135:
Gabe is 100% correct. Valves business practices and Steams architecture have proven time and time again that their efforts to battle piracy are working better than any DRM or other form of piracy protection.

Sure you can crack steam games and force the games to believe they are connecting to a steam network server even though the arent. But a lot of steams games just aren't fun without online play

I was interested in playing the Half Life out of the Orange Box, but with steam, it said that I had to have a constant connection to the internet in order to play, I didn't like that because at home, I have dialup, whereas I could do setup for the highspeed at a friends house. I ended up having to freeze a file in STEAM, and I also had to keep it running (STEAM) in order to play the game after I left the internet. I don't see why I needed to have a connection to the internet to play Half-Life. There is simply no point to it.