Pirates are "Undiscovered Customers" Claims Valve
Speaking at the Game Business Law Summit at SMU, Jason Holtman from Valve was on hand to share Valve's philosophy on game pirates.
I'm quite curious as to how many of those will actually purchase the game and not just continue to play their "free" title. From what I've seen, and I know I do not have the entire picture, pirates will continue to pirate no matter when a game is released.
"There's a big business feeling that there's piracy," he says. But the truth is: "Pirates are underserved customers."
"When you think about it that way, you think, 'Oh my gosh, I can do some interesting things and make some interesting money off of it.'"
"We take all of our games day-and-date to Russia," Holtman says of Valve. "The reason people pirated things in Russia," he explains, "is because Russians are reading magazines and watching television — they say 'Man, I want to play that game so bad,' but the publishers respond 'you can play that game in six months...maybe.' "
"We found that our piracy rates dropped off significantly."
Is this factual or is this way of thinking nothing more than a pipe dream? I see a list of the banned users just from one particular Steam Community chatroom. A list of names that takes 23 seconds to completely scroll through with the use of the "Page Down" key. 90% of those banned, if not more, are due to piracy of Left 4 Dead. This is just a small fraction of the larger picture, and it is still a staggering number of people."When you think about it that way, you think, 'Oh my gosh, I can do some interesting things and make some interesting money off of it.'"
"We take all of our games day-and-date to Russia," Holtman says of Valve. "The reason people pirated things in Russia," he explains, "is because Russians are reading magazines and watching television — they say 'Man, I want to play that game so bad,' but the publishers respond 'you can play that game in six months...maybe.' "
"We found that our piracy rates dropped off significantly."
I'm quite curious as to how many of those will actually purchase the game and not just continue to play their "free" title. From what I've seen, and I know I do not have the entire picture, pirates will continue to pirate no matter when a game is released.