Gabe Newell talks about piracy

Gabe Newell has always been one to think outside the box, and over the years he’s received both praise and criticism along with a devoted PC following. In a recent interview with Cambridge Student Online, Newell got to talking about PC piracy again, and explained his views that the problems with piracy are to do with the services being offered as opposed to the price.

“We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. For example, if a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24/7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country three months after the U.S. release and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.”
“Most DRM solutions diminish the value of the product by either directly restricting a customer’s use or by creating uncertainty… Our goal is to create greater service value than pirates, and this has been successful enough for us that piracy is basically a non-issue for our company.”

It makes it fairly obvious that companies like Activision and EA tend not to agree with Gabe, with more and more titles receiving elaborate forms of DRM and region locks, it seems like Valve are currently the only ones looking at the problem from a different angle.

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