I'm not sure what his speech was regarding Piracy I just mean from a simple... you want to play a game on the PC, look to a torrent of it, getting a crack, potentially ending up with malware on your system, the game wont be able to update without extra work, you wont recieve patches/updates which could cause memory leaks crashing, you miss out on online play a lot of the time.... or you open up steam, buy the game for €2-3 euros in a sale... sorted.

Steam fights piracy by being so good to the paying customer imo, when you have stuff like Origin with Sim City trying to absolutely make the paying customer jump through hoops with always online drm then you push people towards downloading a pirated version which has the drm features removed, it should never be harder for the paying customer to enjoy the product than a pirate imo.

His specch was basically talking about piracy being a "service" issue where companies made it irksome and annoying to deliver their games to you or you having to scramble to find them, finding a torrent was much easier at the time to doing that which was what led Gaben to talk about it and of course before that he invented Steam as a means to combat piracy (There isn't really such a thing as a way to completely obliterate piracy since it happens and exists in many forms and has done for hundreds of years if not longer).

WHen you are like EA and decide you want some of that Steam pie, they for example took their ball and went home with it (taking their games to Origin), trouble with that was that their client was absolute crap for the last 2 and a half years and only roughly this year have they gotten a few things right that eventually Valve was called out on missing (customer service still being worse than Origin's, refunds etc) and eventually sorted out for the most part. THe other issue is that Origin still isn't all the way there like Steam is and Uplay and others are guilty of this to some degree, Steam and GoG for example are the middle men that give you a plethora of different games from different companies. With Origin, Uplay, Battle.net and bethesda's client, you only get games that were funded or owned by them directly which means you only access their library of games and not others, I don't mind that much since I love Blizzard's client quite a bit (though their region lock on who can add who annoys me like Origin's and possibly the other clients do) and Origin's looks pretty slick but lacks a good amount of features that Steam uses. Apart from that little tangent I find that making someone jump through hoops and limiting the library you can gather from said company is likely to drive that person away or sometimes to piracy (I don't pirate games but I certainly won't play Ubisoft games as long as they sell on Steam but force you onto Uplay which technically calls for double layered DRM and is the worst client to date).

Also forgot to add the video Gabe talks about the service in general:

The guy has even done TV interviews:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM21uQR6G_Q