as I know how much people hate going to links lol...

Today’s is the final part, in which I ask Gabe and co the big questions: what’s the point of Steamworks? Is piracy a solved problem? And where’s Episode Three? I wasn’t optimistic that they’d be willing to talk about it, but I couldn’t leave without asking. I’m afraid it didn’t go any better than I expected, but I’ve included the transcript so you can read for yourself. What they did tell me was how Steam revived the Russian games market, why Valve’s competitors actually help their sales, and how not to do DRM.

Gabe Newell.

PC Gamer: What have you guys gained from people using Steamworks?
Steamworks is Valve’s free toolset for developers wanting to make Steam-compatible games – see here for more. Wait, that’s not it… here.

Gabe Newell: We’re getting much better visibility into what their experience is like, and much better tools for making those experiences better.

PC Gamer: The developer’s experiences?

Gabe Newell: Customers, but then developers get that same visibility. Like, the first time that a guy at a developer logs into the Steamworks page and finds out what’s really happening, it’s like, “Oh my god, I’m not selling any copies in Germany. Why am I not selling any copies in Germany?” And they find that out three months before they would through traditional brick and mortar, waiting for the charts to hit. They find out the German localisation is actually Lithuanian, or, I don’t know, what’s a real problem that they would have? Oh, that they hate the German localised version so they’re buying all of their stuff grey market from France. And that their decision to do some update that blocks the ability for those games to run in Germany might be a bad idea – that kind of thing.

So it gives our partners the same kinds of tools that we’ve been using. That’s super valuable. Just the ability to create value for customers and solve problems for customers is vastly increased. We had one company that shipped a whole bunch of DVDs to their customers that didn’t work.

Erik Johnson: They didn’t have keys.

Gabe Newell: Yeah, they didn’t work. And they’re in a position of, because they have Steamworks, their problem magically went away for their customers. And what went from being a potentially incredibly expensive recall that was super frustrating and damaging to their reputation, rightly so, suddenly just went away. And it went away over an 8 hour period, more or less invisibly to customers.

Erik Johnson: It was a hiccup to customers, that something didn’t work one morning and then it did.

Gabe Newell: The biggest thing is not just the distribution kind of issues, it’s the fact that you understand your customer a lot better, and you understand how your customer is reacting to the stuff you’re doing. That’s going to help you fundamentally make a better product. I don’t actually believe that we ever shipped Half-Life 1, because there’s no way you could actually build a product without giving it to customers to find out what you’re doing wrong. It would feel completely like you were on a trapeze without a safety net if we didn’t have those capabilities built. We can see what our customers are doing, where we’ve screwed up, see where our mistakes are and fix them so much faster than we’ve ever been able to before.

PC Gamer: I can see why it’s a good thing for developers that use it, but why is it good for Valve?

Doug Lombardi: Well, it’s more people on Steam. We’ve always been pretty up front about that, right? We make it free for developers to use, and the gain to us is that more people are on Steam. I mean, it’s very plain.

Gabe Newell: It’s one of those things where everybody benefits. I mean, we benefit from having our competitor’s products on Steam, and they benefit from our products being on Steam. There’s this presumption that our industry is a zero sum game, and it’s so not a zero sum game. Nothing is more likely to make a customer less likely to buy other games than a really bad game experience. And nothing makes them buy more games, and want to buy more games, more than having a good gameplay experience.

Doug Lombardi: And the bigger the hype on the game, the more true that is. It’s an amplifier.

Erik Johnson: Finishing a really high quality game makes you want to go out and buy another game right at that moment.

Gabe Newell: Call of Duty on Steam takes advantage of Left 4 Dead 2 customers.

Erik Johnson: Batman. Really good game, same thing.

Gabe Newell: We all win by being able to cross sell.

PC Gamer: It seems like that was really borne out by Killing Floor, which came out hot on the heels of Left 4 Dead, and couldn’t be more similar without actually being a Left 4 Dead game. And yet it sold really well at the same time.

Doug Lombardi: And we were totally cool about that, and Tripwire’s one of the people we talk to the most and are friendliest with out of all the developing community. That was totally a fine thing, they got it and we got it and there was never a moment of like, “Hey you’re treading on our stuff!” or vice versa.

Gabe Newell: Torchlight wouldn’t exist without Steam and Steamworks. So, yeah. We really do view ourselves as being part of this larger community, and our big competitor is not just another first person action shooter, it’s thinking that games aren’t worth our time. Games sucking are a much bigger threat to us than good games from other game companies.

Torchlight was a huge hit for Runic Games, and they really needed one.

PC Gamer: Do you have a good sense of piracy rates with Steam games?

Gabe Newell: They’re low enough that we don’t really spend any time [on it]. When you look at the things we sit around and talk about, as big picture cross game issues, we’re way more concerned about the stability of DirectX drivers or, you know, the erroneous banning of people. That’s way more of an issue for us than piracy.

Once you create service value for customers, ongoing service value, piracy seems to disappear, right? It’s like “Oh, you’re still doing something for me? I don’t mind the fact that I paid for this.” Once you actually localise your product in Russia and ship it on the same day that you ship your English language versions, this theoretical hotbed of piracy becomes your second largest- third largest after Germany in continental Europe? Or third after UK?

Erik Johnson: In terms of retail units?

Gabe Newell: In terms of sales of our products, yeah. Overall, Steam plus retail.

Erik Johnson: Probably second. It’s a big number.

Gabe Newell: The point is that there’s this market that you shouldn’t waste your time on, that went from, “You shouldn’t waste our time on it, they’ll just pirate it,” to “it’s actually a really large market for us now,” once you actually do the things that allow your product to be played. And that’s why some of the DRM approaches are so bad, because they create negative value, not positive value.

I’ve had this problem with software, where my machine crashes and I wasn’t able to release my license. So I have high-end CAD software that I have for hobbies, and my machine crashes and now I’m screwed because of their DRM solution. And that’s bad because it’s much harder to justify purchasing software that might just magically disappear and create a huge hassle for you to recover. What you want to do is go the other way, and say, “Anywhere in the world, any time, you can get your software.” It’s even better if you can get it to run on more platforms, which is why Steam Play is cool, so I can buy it on a Mac and play it on a PC and vice versa. That’s a good thing, that moves customers in the direction of thinking, “Oh, my content is more valuable.”

Erik Johnson: There hasn’t been a case where we’re making a trade off that could negatively impact a customer’s experience to reduce this theoretical piracy rate. Those always seem like awful decisions.

Gabe Newell: You were just saying, you’re making this trade off, and it’s always the wrong one if any customers can be affected negatively by it.

Erik Johnson: Being able to log into any computer and play our games on Steam was a feature that we thought was interesting in the early days of Steam, but has turned out to be an incredibly high value thing for customers, and that’s the kind of thing where a flawed anti piracy strategy would be at odds with that.

Doug Lombardi: The other thing, too, is that gamers are generally good people. If you’re making a good game and you’ve done a good job both from a quality and on the communications standpoint, they’re more than happy to give you their money. I mean, we get mail all the time. Gabe gets more mail I think directly from customers but EJ and I get a fair amount. And like, after we ship something that’s good, we get mail saying, “I just went out and bought a second copy of it, just because I liked it so much I wanted to pay you guys again.” Or, “I went and bought it from my uncle or brother,” or whatever. So that’s my take on a lot of it, just do your job and people are more than happy to pay for it.

Gabe Newell: The other thing that’s always funny is how unbelievably smart the gaming community is, and how accurate. You see other people just lying or making up stuff, and it’s like, “Oh my God, no. Don’t go there.”

PC Gamer: Last time I was at your old office, on the whiteboard there was a pros and cons analysis of another weapon versus the Gravity Gun – something called the Weaponiser. Was that an Episode Three thing?

Gabe Newell: No, it was an internal design experiment that we were doing, which hasn’t seen the light of day.

Erik Johnson: That must have been a long time ago, that must have been during our direct to design experiments.

PC Gamer: Is there some sort of big surprise in Episode Three?

Gabe Newell: …

(Long, uncomfortable pause)

Doug Lombardi: Next question! (Laughs)

PC Gamer: When are you going to start talking about it?

Gabe Newell: …

(Long, uncomfortable pause)

Doug Lombardi: Next question!

PC Gamer: Nothing at all? I have to ask.

Gabe Newell: I understand, and I have to not say anything.

PC Gamer: Every now and then you guys give a hint of something.

Gabe Newell: And then he (points at Doug) yells at me!

Doug Lombardi: So I tend to sit in and just cut it all off. (Laughs)
 

The sheer awkwardness of that exchange made me glad I’d left those questions till last. For the rest of our enormous interviews, everyone at Valve had been remarkably candid, articulate and obliging. You expect Valve to be smart, you don’t always expect them to be so accommodating. So while I’m still no wiser about when the Half-Life series will continue, the sheer tonnage of everything else they told me paints an extraordinary picture of what they’re up to in the meantime.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2010/09/15/we-ask-gabe-newell-about-piracy-drm-and-episode-three/

damn why did I put this in the PC section lol, I meant to put it in the gaming section oh well.

Lol, just read this and was gonna post myself. I think that Valve and Gabe just "get it" when it comes to piracy and DRM. Don't fight it with all this crap that means the legitimate copy is actually inferior to the pirated copy, but make your product high value so people don't mind paying for it.

exactly lol, stuff like Ubisoft's DRM is just a waste of money that could have been used to make a better game that more people would be willing to buy. Hell the bad publicity probably lost more sales than piracy for those games lol. 

my favourite quote from the article would have to be 

"Doug Lombardi: The other thing, too, is that gamers are generally good people. If you’re making a good game and you’ve done a good job both from a quality and on the communications standpoint, they’re more than happy to give you their money. I mean, we get mail all the time. Gabe gets more mail I think directly from customers but EJ and I get a fair amount. And like, after we ship something that’s good, we get mail saying, “I just went out and bought a second copy of it, just because I liked it so much I wanted to pay you guys again.” Or, “I went and bought it from my uncle or brother,” or whatever. So that’s my take on a lot of it, just do your job and people are more than happy to pay for it."

If only more devs and publishers followed this train of thought. I hope they'll all come to realise the value of the Valve attitude to piracy, as it means everyone wins.

Speaking of DRM, I encountered the bad side when I recently picked up The Witcher Enhanced Edition earlier this week.

The game took about a half an hour to install on my PC, I go to play it and it crashes giving me a message to the effect I need to run it as administrator. I think "okie dokie," maybe I need to patch it. I download The Witcher 1.5 patch from CD Projekt's website. Going to install the patch and it crashes out on me.

I spend the next hour searching for an answer to find out that I got a bad version of the 1.5 patch. I spend the next hour downloading the patch from another site and 5 hours later after purchasing it I find myself playing The Witcher for the first time.

This DRM crapola is over the top. I had not noticed this ever since I stopped buying new PC games in 2005 and transitioned into WoW in early 2007. The two year difference was my last 2 years of college where I was playing old games in between getting laid and hanging out with friends getting shitfaced every night off of pot and alcohol.

Not only do I notice this in games, but I notice it in the ease of use from Windows XP to Windows 7. In Windows XP, you could learn how to find and manipulate files fairly easily. For example, the .sqlite files for Mozilla Firefox required a few steps to get to them and send them to the trashbin. In Windows 7, the ease of use is just atrocious. I have to run a search just to find the .sqlite files to delete.

I understand measures taken to prevent piracy and hacking, but gosh damn did the PC industry overreact and go so far as to make operating systems damn near unmanageable for those of us who became comfortable with Windows XP.

Are you sure it's DRM? I was under the impression CD Projekt had a similar view to Valve when it came to DRM. They run GoG.com where their isn't any DRM for instance.

That's what I was thinking, plus nothing in Killiana1a's post seems to indicate any problems with DRM. As for my experience with The Witcher, I bought it on Steam, downloaded it fully patched and ready to run and haven't had a problem with it.

Yes, according to CD Projekt, The Witcher 1.5 patch removed all the DRM from The Witcher and allowed you to play the game without the disc. They said so on a stick page in their own forums. The Witcher Enhanced Edition came packaged with the 1.4 patch where the DRM that triggers TAGES on Windows 7 is still present.

I resolved the issue, but not after it left a sour taste in my mouth.