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Gabe Newell "The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology"

ríomhaire

Valve co-founder and managing director talks piracy, sales and economics:

One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.

[...]

We do a 75 percent price reduction, our Counter-Strike experience tells us that our gross revenue would remain constant. Instead what we saw was our gross revenue increased by a factor of 40. Not 40 percent, but a factor of 40.

Full transcript (it's not very long)

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Comments

RobertFoster

So, he doesn't consider having to log in to Steam an anti-piracy measure?

I agree that certain DRM is more anti-consumer than anti-pirate.

Grumpypants

He does talk a lot of sense (on this topic at least) Give people a good service and they will respond. I still remember the Football manager fiasco where people had to go online and authenticate their purchase, the site couldn't handle the traffic and crashed so the only people who could play it without any issues were the pirates !

moomooman

I always buy my games but in the last two years I've found that the required sign-ups and online authentication shenanigans are reaching the point where a cracked download seems attractive.

I dont want Games for Windows, or battlenet, or even steam. On more than one occasion I havent been able to play a game I legally own (and physically posess) because I couldnt sign in to a online service.

Seems that its punishing the legit consumer and not afecting the pirate anyway.

ríomhaire

RobertFoster wrote: »

So, he doesn't consider having to log in to Steam an anti-piracy measure?

I agree that certain DRM is more anti-consumer than anti-pirate.

Really Steam isn't intended as an anti-piracy measure, that's just a side-effect of it. Steam was a pointless piece of crap when it came out but now with all the stat-tracking and community features as well as the overlay and screenshot feature I think it adds more to any game that uses it properly now that it annoys.

Also not every game you buy on Steam needs Steam running to be able to play. The ones that run Steamworks with achievements and such obviously do but I believe GTA4 for example doesn't require Steam running at all.

Games in steam/steamapps/[username] folder will never run without Steam but games in the steam/steamapps/common folder may run with or without it.

Shiminay

I don't consider Steam an anti-piracy authentication thing, but it is one of it's features. I don't know what I'd do without it at this stage and I was one of it's most vocal opponents when it came out because it simply didn't take into account that 10 years ago (or however long it was) there were people like me who didn't have broadband and simply could not afford to leave a dial up connection live for 5 hours waiting for a Steam Client update and then a further 14 hours for a game client update and signing in in Off-Line Mode was disabled if you'd not played in 3 or 4 days.

Mr Newell is correct though, focus on providing a better service to the people who've paid for the game and stop punishing them with jumping through silly hoops for having been good enough to purchase in the first place.

The pre-order DLC stuff is a part of this too - it's equal parts "new game sales" and encouraging people not to pirate.

Myrddin

You'd think he'd close his busy mouth for a while & release the next incarnation of Half Life.

Shut up Newell, make with the goods.

krudler

its the same as anti pirate ads on dvds.

pirate copies= play movie.
legit copies= 10 mins of unskippable ads and "you better have bought this!!!" shenangians.

mcmoustache

Until Steam was installed on my PC, I hadn't bought a legit game in about 6 years. That game required the CD to be in the drive and since this was a PITA, I had to get a NO-CD crack. Since then I decided not to bother buying since I was going to have to crack the games anyway.

Then, a few months ago I heard about TF2 being free to play. I decided to give it a try so I signed up to Steam and had a great time playing the game. I still do.

I found the Steam client to be excellent for what it does. I understand that it's a type of DRM but it's very non-intrusive. The store and stats collection work well and the News section is handy for finding deals.

Unfortunately, these deals are sometimes very good. Portal was offered for free a few months ago too so I installed that. Then, I ended up getting the Halflife episodes for 7 quid each. Now, my credit card details are already there so I can buy games in seconds. Since then I got left4dead, the STALKER games and the GTA games for a pittance.

They've successfully turned a pirate into a legit buyer. I know that the games I buy won't píss me off and I know that I'll always have my games. losing CDs no longer matters. I check the deals regularly and I'm buying more games than I can play.

Steam are offering a good service that suits me and as a result, they are getting my money. When games companies try to inconvenience me with DRM, they don't get a penny from me.

I don't think my attitude is too unique and I think that Steam's success reflects this. They know what gamers want, they know that we're willing to pay but they also know that selling a product which is inferior to those offered by pirates just won't fly.

Please excuse the fanboy tone in my post but Steam have really impressed and surprised me.

Voodu Child

RobertFoster wrote: »

So, he doesn't consider having to log in to Steam an anti-piracy measure?

I agree that certain DRM is more anti-consumer than anti-pirate.

You misread it. He is saying that DRM is not the easiest way to stop piracy.

That doesnt mean he is dismissing DRM. He is just saying that the first thing to worry about is by providing a better product/service. Sort that out before you worry about other ways to reduce piracy.

eddhorse

EnterNow wrote: »

You'd think he'd close his busy mouth for a while & release the next incarnation of Half Life.

Shut up Newell, make with the goods.

+1 from Ed

Kiith

If only Ubisoft would listen to him and stop being dicks with their over the top DRM. They'll not be getting a penny from me until they do.

FruitLover

krudler wrote: »

its the same as anti pirate ads on dvds.

pirate copies= play movie.
legit copies= 10 mins of unskippable ads and "you better have bought this!!!" shenangians.

You wouldn't kill a policeman, steal his hat, go to the toilet in his hat, then leave the hat on the policeman's widow's doorstep. And then steal it again.

Doge

FruitLover wrote: »

You wouldn't kill a policeman, steal his hat, go to the toilet in his hat, then leave the hat on the policeman's widow's doorstep. And then steal it again.

QUE?

Duggy747

He does talk sense, though. Valve's games don't have the same experience cracked as they do integrated with a full system like Steam.

There are work arounds to use Steam on cracked games but the idea of having to repeatedly crack your game every week because of new updates is daunting, especially if the latest crack screws things up. L4D2 would be an example of this which has to be repeatedly cracked when a certain update is released, it's just too annoying to keep up for the casual downloader.

Steam runs a good service and community which can't be replicated on cracked games unless there are dedicated servers & sites people can connect to.

ShooterSF

waveform wrote: »

QUE?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg

danthefan

All my games are tied to my Steam account, I can download them to any computer at any time as many times as I like. Not sure how this would be achieved without a log in. I think Steam is a great service now tbh, and I buy a lot of games on it, particularly when the sales are on.

Not even sure why companies bother with their anti-piracy stuff anymore anyway. Is there even one example of a recent PC game that hasn't been cracked?

Doge

ShooterSF wrote: »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg

Ohhhhhh.....si.

I thought Fruit Lover may have been bate from d'oul heroin again.

Been meaning to watch the series lately, and I think that clip may just have swayed me.

anonymous_joe

danthefan wrote: »

All my games are tied to my Steam account, I can download them to any computer at any time as many times as I like. Not sure how this would be achieved without a log in. I think Steam is a great service now tbh, and I buy a lot of games on it, particularly when the sales are on.

Not even sure why companies bother with their anti-piracy stuff anymore anyway. Is there even one example of a recent PC game that hasn't been cracked?

I love Steam, but I remember the howls of rage from people I knew when they first bought Half-Life 2.

Adyx

anonymous_joe wrote: »

I love Steam, but I remember the howls of rage from people I knew when they first bought Half-Life 2.

Not having an Internet connection when it came out (and not having done my homework), I couldn't play it for 6 months or so after I bought it.

ShadowHearth

Once more cd project red gets my respect: droped drm on witcher 2 after 1 month release. I bet it still sells like hot pancakes. It's allways priced reasonable too.

Minecraft creater said: pirated copy is not a sale and it will newer be.

You can put such drastic drms like give a print of your cock everytime you want to play mw3, but pirate will still just crack it.

Drm makes paying customer suffer, and it should be other way around.

I pirated a good few games back in the day. I could not afford it. 1 licensed game costed about 1 months wages from where I came!

Pirates will pirate, paying customers will pay for games. All the resaurces spent on stupid drm, should better go to development and debugging of games. I look at you ubisoft...

hooradiation

ShadowHearth wrote: »

Once more cd project red gets my respect: droped drm on witcher 2 after 1 month release. I bet it still sells like hot pancakes. It's allways priced reasonable too.

Counterpoint - humble indy bundle. No DRM, pay whatever you like and the money goes either to the developer directly or to charity.
25% piracy rate.

People are shits and there are no excuses or justifications for piracy maybe, with the sole exception of really old, out of print games.
So frankly, publishers are justified in doing whatever the hell they want with regards to DRM. Don't like it? Try growing the fuck up and just not buying it instead of pirating it.

Cuddlesworth

hooradiation wrote: »

Counterpoint - humble indy bundle. No DRM, pay whatever you like and the money goes either to the developer directly or to charity.
25% piracy rate.

People are shits and there are no excuses or justifications for piracy maybe, with the sole exception of really old, out of print games.
So frankly, publishers are justified in doing whatever the hell they want with regards to DRM. Don't like it? Try growing the fuck up and just not buying it instead of pirating it.

When given the option 75% of people paid for it. I think thats pretty good. If you listened to advocates of DRM measures that punish the paying user, they would imply a 100% theft rate.

Myrddin

hooradiation wrote: »

Counterpoint - humble indy bundle. No DRM, pay whatever you like and the money goes either to the developer directly or to charity.
25% piracy rate.

People are shits and there are no excuses or justifications for piracy maybe, with the sole exception of really old, out of print games.
So frankly, publishers are justified in doing whatever the hell they want with regards to DRM. Don't like it? Try growing the fuck up and just not buying it instead of pirating it.

Having an unreliable, or very slow internet connection might be a pain though don't you think? Thats no excuse for piracy, but when you say publishers can do whatever they want DRM wise...not everyones situation is as clear cut as it may seem.

ríomhaire

anonymous_joe wrote: »

I love Steam, but I remember the howls of rage from people I knew when they first bought Half-Life 2.

Oh god yes. I'm a huge unashamed Valve fanboy but when I bought HL2 I was on dial-up (in fact I was still on dial-up by the time the Orange Box came around) and Steam was such a huuuuuge pain in the ass. At that point it was pretty much only a shop and update service and because Valve update so often and my interent was so bad if I accidently started Steam while connected to the interent it would start updating and offline mode won't work again until it was finished. It was all pretty damn painful.

hooradiation

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

When given the option 75% of people paid for it. I think thats pretty good. If you listened to advocates of DRM measures that punish the paying user, they would imply a 100% theft rate.

Given that it was everything piracy apologists have said would stop piracy AND it was for charity the 25% rate is a disgusting number.
So, yeah - the "no DRM and lower prices" solution is just nonsense.

EnterNow wrote: »

Having an unreliable, or very slow internet connection might be a pain though don't you think? Thats no excuse for piracy, but when you say publishers can do whatever they want DRM wise...not everyones situation is as clear cut as it may seem.

I have no problem with that. You can't sell to everyone and if your DRM cuts out people with poor internet connections then fair enough. Just how many people would be excluded by that? More or less than, say would be excluded by not having a PC significantly powerful enough to run the game?

I don't expect you to know the answer, I doubt anyone does but there's always going to be sections of the total market that'll be excluded by decisions made over development - there's not much point singling out always on DRM as something that should be removed on the grounds that it'll exclude some people because you can apply that to every single decision about making a game and they'd be equally valid.

Myrddin

hooradiation wrote: »

I have no problem with that. You can't sell to everyone and if your DRM cuts out people with poor internet connections then fair enough. Just how many people would be excluded by that? More or less than, say would be excluded by not having a PC significantly powerful enough to run the game?

I don't expect you to know the answer, I doubt anyone does but there's always going to be sections of the total market that'll be excluded by decisions made over development - there's not much point singling out always on DRM as something that should be removed on the grounds that it'll exclude some people because you can apply that to every single decision about making a game and they'd be equally valid.

Move to Achill island. I doubt you'd be making that same argument in a month. Chances are your hdd will be filled with fixed exe's, & no cd patches etc. And that wouldn't be because your inclined to pirate, it' would be because you've simply no other choice.

Though in reality your correct, its a case of exclusion over functionality. Again though, all this does is force peoples hand. You will always get pirates, thats accepted, but what Newall is rightly saying is that a percentage of those pirates would be consumers, if the authentication procedure was more transparent/less intrusive.

gizmo

I don't understand why Newell keeps peddling this "don't put in anti-piracy tech and you'll stop piracy" argument, it's been proven on numerous occassions that it simply isn't true.

hooradiation has already pointed out the Humble Indie Bundle debacle but there was also similar incidents such as with Demigod, World of Goo and the disgusting levels of piracy for GoG content.

Hell, let's look at last years most pirated games on the PC from last year...

1 Call of Duty: Black Ops (4,270,000)
2 Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (3,960,000)
3 Mafia 2 (3,550,000)
4 Mass Effect 2 (3,240,000)
5 Starcraft II (3,120,000)

Now, four of those games were on Steam, the platform which gives "people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates" yet look at those figures. Now I'm not in any way insinuating these are lost sales, they quite clearly aren't, but when you have statements being made like this.

"Make no mistake," said SEGA this week, "if one quarter of the people that usually pirate [Football Manager] switch to purchasing Football Manager 2012, the sales of the game worldwide would more than double."

Then I don't understand why people can't see some form of DRM is required.

Disclaimer: I love Steam, I think it's ****ing great.

Overheal

The slow internet connection argument doesnt really excuse piracy does it? It requirs just as much bandwidth to download a game from btmon as it does from Steam if not more because you are having to share with the swarm.

Gabe Newell is a legend for finally showing the industry "The model WORKS". How many years have I been going on about if they just make the games cheaper, not only will they have more players but more revenue. Proven by his Counterstrike figures. And again by the TF2 figures: Gabe also said recently that TF2 playership jump up 5 Fold when it went free, and how many of those have bought something in the Mann Co. Store?

Steam aside from being a piece of DRM is a great catalog now and a digital locker with unlimited installs and activations. How many times have I migrated PCs or Reinstalled windows since I first got The Orange Box? Probably about 8-10 times. Never once did I have to worry about losing my games. And now if you go try to download most games that have been out more than a few years from torrents, theres a good chance you're not going to find it, or the installation procedure is going to be different than what you did before, and you'll have to install MagicISO or Daemontools or whatever crack, which itself is more annoying than having to run Steam. And it takes up more space because not only do you install the game but then you mount an ISO for it. GAH!

Game Piracy has been long since dead for me. And Movie piracy has been dying for a while too, thanks to Netflix.

Kiith

Piracy will always exist. Most people, if given an easy option, will download something for free rather than paying for it. Think console gamers are somehow better than pc games because they don't pirate as much? Remove the security on the PS3 and we'll see how that goes.

I've pirated games before. Not going to try and give an excuse for it, as there really isn't a legitimate one. I was in college and broke. It was free. What did i care at the time. None of those are good reasons to pirate, but they were convenient reasons. I don't pirate games anymore, and haven't for ages. There are a few reasons, and Steam is definitely one of them.

It's a fantastic service, that really sets the bar for DD and non-invasive DRM.

hooradiation

EnterNow wrote: »

Move to Achill island. I doubt you'd be making that same argument in a month. Chances are your hdd will be filled with fixed exe's, & no cd patches etc. And that wouldn't be because your inclined to pirate, it' would be because you've simply no other choice.

Well anyone who moves to Achill deserves everything they get....
And I'm curious, how am I going to get all these no-cd patches and pirate on a connection that won't allow me to authenticate with remote servers?

And you've missed out on the secret third option - simply do without.
Video games aren't a necessity, they are a luxury, so I find any argument which takes the view that you simply must have access to them to be flawed.
Living on Achill or being poor or whatever don't give you the right to pirate because games are luxury goods.
You are not being deprived by not having them, you are being inconvenienced.
In that case, deal with it.

EnterNow wrote: »

Though in reality your correct, its a case of exclusion over functionality. Again though, all this does is force peoples hand.

See above, your hand isn't being forced. This isn't a loaf of bread to feed your starving children we're talking about here.

EnterNow wrote: »

You will always get pirates, thats accepted, but what Newall is rightly saying is that a percentage of those pirates would be consumers, if the authentication procedure was more transparent/less intrusive.

That I can agree with, but I have no issue in publishers using less transparent methods if they want to and thusly I have no issue simply not buying the game if I think the DRM would be a step to far.
That's pretty much as far as it goes.

And I've used Steam, GFWL, uplay and games with starforce on them, and I've had zero problems.
Seeing as the last three make grown men howl in dismay I'm wondering exactly how much more intrusive people think DRM will get, especially with the steam model pushing the idea that DRM as a service is the way to go?