At an interview at the Game Business Law summit this past week, Valve director of business development and legal affairs Jason Holtman spoke out about the company’s thoughts on piracy, surprisingly calling pirates “underserved customers.”
“There’s a big business feeling that there’s piracy, 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 added. “The reason people pirated things in Russia 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.’ ”
Holtman also noted, correctly, that publishers normally only care about the west leaving eastern nations with no real other alternative but piracy. That being said, Valve products are launched in Russia, in Russian, on the same day they hit North American shelves. After doing so, the company “found that our piracy rates dropped off significantly.”
Steam currently has 15 million “connected gamers” speaking over 20 languages.
Result for: russians
Valve president Gabe Newell took the time to talk out about the “threat” of piracy in the PC Market recently, and had some interesting things to add on that matter.
“When you list the things that we worry about in our business, piracy is not one of them,” he told the audience when piracy was brought up.
His statements differ from that of many large publishers, who for the most part feel piracy is killing acceptable profit margins in the PC gaming business. Newell feels that Valve’s Steam platform is mostly protected from piracy.
“We’ve got great facilities that make it very hard for people to pirate. And more importantly, the service value of having an ongoing relationship with us is high enough that it causes people to not be very interested in piracy.
“It’s a dangerous thing to pirate one of our games because later on, when we catch you, you lose all your games, or you can’t play multiplayer.”
Before Newell came up, Valve’s Jason Holtman was asked how he felt about the rampant piracy in emerging markets such as Russia and China. He felt those fears were misplaced and the problems could be fixed rather easily.
He added that Valve solved the problem of international piracy by releasing their games simultaneously worldwide, unlike most publishers which release the games up to six months later in markets outside of Western Europe and the US.
“We know that that’s the major place where this rampant piracy myth comes from,” Holtman said speaking of Russia. “Rampant piracy is just unserved customers.”
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