Valve is kinda the phenomenon. Pirates seem to respect them.

Bullshit, Ubisoft, EA, and Capcom complain but they all provide quality PC games.

You don't hear much from Activision and Blizzard but they're clearly concerned about piracy as well. Activision actually hunts down pirates. Diablo 3 will require DRM even for offline play.

Some developers simply can't rely on the PC a lone anymore and focus on consoles.

Ubisoft, EA and capcom would be better placed in the PC market if they didn't make dodgy ports of the console versions to the PC.

EA's biggest franchise is FIFA the pc version has only just been bought into line with the console versions in terms of quality if these companys expect people to buy there products then they need to ensure quality before release. Capcom are terrible at this as well having played DMC and RE's on the PC then Playstation you can see how much they really cared about the PC version

The statement itself makes sense at first but then you realize 1) that developers don't generally try to make bad games on purpose and 2) not every developer has the money to iterate on a game until it's perfect.

I love Valve but that's a pretty closed minded naive statement.

Steam predates Xbox live marketplace by over 2 years... He is also in the business of selling console games, and being someone who is actually selling PC games he is probably the only person qualified to comment on this. Unlike you he knows what he is talking about as he has the data, he has games that sell better on PC than console etc.

So Ubisoft with draconian DRM, EA with the best selling PC series in history plus the only major publisher leading major game development on PC (proving that PC slaes are important to them despite piracy) and Capcom with sporadic low quality ports are allowed to complain but Gabe who suffers from piracy as much as anyone can't because he points out it's not as big an issue as other people say is a duche, right...

So big publishers can't afford to but small indie devs with no financial backing can, right...

Mojang can sell 4 million preorders with a 75%+ piracy rate, and terreria that sold almost half a million copies in a month both with a 0 marketing budget. Just because some devs/publishers can't doesn't mean that it's not true that if they did they could sell well on PC. The Witcher 2 is selling better than the first and has already crossed 1 million copies sold and they are a small developer with little marketing. Then there is Crysis with 3 million+ sales on PC and Crysis 2 with it's much larger marketing budget and 3 platforms has only managed 2 million so far, Starcraft 2 is selling faster than 1 etc people can do it when they try unfotunatly it seems like only indies seem to try most of the time these days.

I recently just got a new PC that can play any game out there right now, and I am severely disappointed that just about every game I want for PC has some type of DRM that performs rootkit like functions - I will not give them any of my money as long as they have that crap on their games unless..........

I have a question to pose - I thought about buying some of the games I want for PC and then downloading them without the DRM - so I would be downloading them off a pirate site but I would have already given the company my money so I wouldn't actually be stealing since I legally purchased the game.

Do you guys think this is ethical or does it just add to the problem?

Indie games and AAA or just even console games are entirely different businesses.  It's not exactly easy to compare Minecraft and Mass Effect.

Game studios eat through a shit-ton of money a month, more than it costs to develop entire indie teams, because there are large teams to pay for and general overhead.  Because of that, independant studios simply can't afford to iterate until the game is perfect and publishers don't want to keep throwing money away. 

Again, studios don't set out to make bad games.  Nobody kicked off a project like Haze off and said alright guys, we're going to make a real stinker here and waste a lot of time doing it.  They're generally trying to make the best game possible but budget and time can stop that.  As much as every studio would love it, there's no magical fun button a studio can press to make a game fun.

I respect Gabe Newell a lot but the statement-- if you want to fight piracy, make better games-- is just a beyond ignorant and naive statement.  Unless you really do want games only like Minecraft and other indie games (and believe me, I came up with 20 shitty indie games for every good one you bring up), that statement doesn't work at all.  Valve is an excellent developer and they have the luxury of being able to take their time, but that's not something most studios are able to have.  Most of them want that luxury, but not everyone can be Valve.