Valve’s Take on Piracy

by Stephen Spring on January 19th, 2009 at 11:22 am EDT - 527 views

Valve, creators of such games as Half Life, Counter Strike, and more recently Left 4 Dead, have come forward today at a Game Business Law summit at Southern Methodist University. At the summit Valve stated that the piracy problems were largely the fault of the marketers and not the consumers.

We take all of our games day-and-date to Russia. 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.’ 

Holtman then stated that whenever their Valve products were readily available in Russia, piracy of said game dropped dramatically. Holtman took aim at the marketers again saying that the majority of pirates were simply “Underserved” customers. (That’s UNDER-SERVED)

This comes as a suprise to many as Valve, the creator of Steam, currently is one of two dominating powers in the video game sales industry and for a company whos livelyhood is creating and selling games to take a defensive stand point strikes us as a little odd.

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EA’s PC Games Hit Steam

by Bradley Wint on December 21st, 2008 at 2:41 pm EDT - 220 views

Electronic Arts (EA) has partnered with Valve to make some of their more recent titles available via the popular game purchasing client, Steam. Some of the first games being made available are Spore, Need for Speed Undercover, Mass Effect, EA Sports FIFA Manager 2009 and much more. The partnership between the two companies will now allow for people anywhere in the globe to purchase PC titles via the Steam client.

“We are pleased to extend our holiday titles to gamers worldwide via Steam — a revolutionary technology that is one of the game industry’s most successful digital distribution services,” – EA COO, John Pleasants

Steam has been a popular tool for other companies to distribute their games, including some top names such as Activisio, SimBin, Atari and others.  Check out the Steam website for more details.

Source: Gamesutra