Valve co-founder and managing director, Gabe Newel, believes that game publishers are enticing piracy through their customer-unfriendly service and abusive DRM schemes.
"In general, we think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," he told the Cambridge Student magazine. "For example, if a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US 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 customers use or by creating uncertainty."
Newel believes that Valve is almost unaffected by piracy, thanks to its customer-friendly services and its unrestrictive DRM.
"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. For example, prior to entering the Russian market, we were told that Russia was a waste of time because everyone would pirate our products. Russia is now about to become our largest market in Europe."
