Valve Says Pirates Are Just Underserved Customers

Says easy availability is the key to reducing piracy rates.

By Kat Bailey, 01/19/2009

Valve is one half of the pair of companies currently dominating PC gaming. So what do they think of piracy? Maybe not what you would expect.

According to GameDaily, Valve director of business development and legal affairs addressed the issued at the Game Business Law summit at Southern Methodist University, calling pirates "underserved customers." Taken from that perspective, Holtman says there are some interesting things they can do to make money off it.

"We take all of our games day-and-date to Russia," Holtman said. "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.' "

To Holtman, the key is making sure that Valve products are available on the Moscow shelves, in Russian, when they hit America. After that, he said that "we found that our piracy rates dropped off significantly."

Holtman also took aim at the conventional wisdom surrounding paid downloadable content, saying that giving away content meant that "sales would spike for several products, both at retail and through Steam." On that last point, at least, Criterion might agree with Burnout Paradise. As for the rest of the industry, it'll be interesting to see whether they're taking notes.

Image courtesy of GameDaily

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Go Go Valve...

Valve is brilliant when it comes to piracy and DRM use. They make it so pirates get the games day-to-date and add value to their DRM.

I like Valve. Nice guys

It's ironic that by making Steam more expensive to Europeans they will increase piracy(or convince people to shop somewhere else).

Even more ironic that EA have just put their games on Steam (sans-SecuROM infestation), but not for the UK. Idiotic.

(This post is to commemorate the fact that I have officially joined the Valve love train)


I just finished playing The orange box; Half life 2, it's 2 episodes, portal, and TF2.
I also have Left 4 Dead.

All I can say is that Valve cares about making good games.
This makes them sound all the more better.
Now, I have to try and get rid of the shitty 'EA download manager' virus EA installed on my computer with spore.

disable its autostart from your config menu than uninstall it.

Valve is hawt, and all its employees. I guess EA can just bombard its games with so much advertising...

This topic is sorely missing the usual suspects.... where'd you go twestrm?

Here's somebody who knows an opportunity when he sees it.

Piracy means your product is desired. You just have to figure out the barriers preventing people from paying for it. Some of those barriers are beyond your control, but others can be lowered or torn down altogether.