Valve’s lesser evil between pirates and cheaters is the former. Cheaters, in their words, are a much more serious threat. Yet, it’s really interesting to see where other companies are focusing their efforts to an exorbitant degree.
–Ravious
6 thoughts on “Valve’s Lesser Evil”
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I really like the EA approach to (there’s a phrase I never thought I would use) combating piracy; Offer DLC that only works with legit copies as an incentive.
I like it for two reasons:
1) It doesn’t riddle my game with intrusive, annoying DRM.(Hello there, Ubisoft!)
2) It pushes them to make better DLC content.
Penny Arcade hit the nail on the head: I’m much more likely to pirate a Ubisoft game than I am to buy it, for example. (Though only marginally, because I don’t pirate games as a rule.)
Well I know with Borderlands that I bought without Securom… they were going to try and put that shit on my computer IF I bought the DLC. So that’s pretty bad too… they “punish” for being a loyal customer AND on Steam too.
I want the devs to be able to protect their wares, but when they treat me like I don’t own my computer and they can crap all over it with whatever they want…. then they lose me as a customer.
Well, of course cheaters are a more serious threat, at least to Valve, since they sell a lot of competition-oriented games. To use an MMO comparison, pirates are like the people in an F2P game who never buy anything from the item shop: you may not be making any money from them, but they’re still contributing to your bottom line since they give the paying customers somebody to play with. Cheaters, on the other hand, drive people to play a different game.
I don’t pirate games very often. If I ever do it is a single player game, it is over a year old, and someone somewhere said it was good. You just can’t pirate multiplayer games unless you’re lanning.
Movies on the other hand…. I don’t pirate those either.
Valve doesn’t have to worry about piracy though, because they rarely make games: they make a distribution channel to profit over other people making them. So of course they will worry about cheaters-their bottom line is secure.
I wouldn’t say rarely. I know plenty of people that bought L4D2 to play it solo (as stupid as I think that is), and the HL series and Portal can be easily pirated and played.