| ameratsu said: Gabe has a point. I can pretty easily accept that piracy is a non-issue for valve. More than anything, Gabe realizes that antagonizing pirates is a losing battle because of how easily offended PC gamers are to any notion of wrongdoing. I also agree part of the problem is that the pirated product is in many cases better than the bought product. The biggest 'better' will always be a pricetag of $0, all other benefits are a subset of that. Like anything, there is a lot of nuance to piracy, and the reasons that people repeat online as justifiable or even noble reasons for piracy are kind of embarassing. At the same time, the topic of piracy has been beaten to death over and over. I'm not sure what to get out of this other than Gabe panders to PC gamers by showing that providing a decent product on decent terms is appealing to consumers? |
Well actually no. Consumer psychology shows us that consumers WANT to pay a fair price for something. Given the choice of paying a price a consumer thinks is fair, or paying nothing without the creators approval, the VAST majority of people would choose the first option.
Aside from which, It's a lot bigger issue then that.
To put it more clearly, most people see a videogame as a finished virtual product. Like a Virtual House. Well a liscense to a digital house.
While Gabe see's it as a vitural service. Something you pay a downpayment on, with updates with new content provided to you, with options to earn or buy... giving them more value either way because you are either providing money, or your time, which is also like money since friends who see you play the games will be more likely to play them.
TF2 for example, has almost no piracy anymore. Pirates end up way behind and take forever to come up with the same items valve releases in updates, that can be gained or earned however you want. It even drives sales of other games with it's promotions!
Another good example is DCU online, which despite being an MMO actually shows how it could work in a Single player game. (though somewhat less so since there big stuff is buy only.)
The problem is, a digital house is problematic, because with a design, anyone can copy it.
A digital service, nobody can copy that, because you never know what's going to come next, and it takes a lot of time and effort to hack things added in later that are maintained by a server.
