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Newell: Fight piracy by offering better service than what pirates are downloading
Okay Geek Team
In the world of gaming there’s not always a clear cut way to make money. Our time today is much different than decades past where ones could simple cash in on a quick side-scroller for kids to play. DLC, piracy, free-to-play models, and expansions have changed the way developers make and lose money. But one studio in particular seems to have figured out the in’s and out’s of what makes consumers tick, as well as the best means to fight against the losses incurred by piracy. We’re talking about the one and only Valve, headed by Gabe Newell.
Speaking at the WTIA TechNW conference earlier this month in Seattle, Washington, Valve’s own Gabe Newell gave a brief explanation on how the studio experiments with the gaming world’s current economic structure:
Gabe Newell
Valve Co-founder and managing director“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. For example, Russia. You say, oh, we’re going to enter Russia, people say, you’re doomed, they’ll pirate everything in Russia. Russia now outside of Germany is our largest continental European market.
[…] but the point was, the people who are telling you that Russians pirate everything are the people who wait six months to localize their product into Russia. … So that, as far as we’re concerned, is asked and answered. It doesn’t take much in terms of providing a better service to make pirates a non-issue.”
Valve may have set up Steam to be the iTunes of the gaming world, but its customer service and continuous, unorthodox market research has set it apart from simply being just a digital store. Newell’s interests in understanding why people pirate in the first place is the reason why he’s been able to keep Steam that way.
The full interview can be read here — GeekWire
