By Valve, owners of the most successful online game retailer – Steam, have a little insight into the world of selling games and, more importantly, the piracy levels.
Or rather, it’s their boss Gabe Newell is the one who offers up a new take on game piracy, with specific reasoning for doing so. When you own a video game store that sells millions of copies you probably know something about the video game market.
Newell raised some important points during a conference in Seattle (WTIA TechNW) is what actually drives users to piracy, blaming game developers and publishers before anything else.
Gabe Newell
According to the Valve co-founder, gaming piracy has its roots in poor service rather than the prohibitive pricing, as has been previously thought of.
Sure, Steam has plenty of income or new clients from the many discounts and deals they offer but quite a significant number of the millions of dollars they’ve made comes from pre-orders and full price purchases.
While Steam and its managers seem to have a better grasp on what the game buying customer wants and what he gets from pirated products, Newell says there’s still plenty of things about piracy and the gaming market they don’t understand.
To that end, Valve is going to be putting the millions of Steam users to several experiments, just as they have been doing so far to get as far as they are at present.
The main advice Gabe Newell has for other people in the gaming industry is that they need to improve their services rather than lower their costs. This was something Russia thought Steam very well.
Much like most of Eastern Europe, Russia is renown for the high rate of pirated games and most retailers have been avoiding it for this reason. In Steam’s experience not doing so turned out great as Russia is now their second largest market in Europe.
It will certainly be interesting what the rest of the gaming industry plans to do when armed with this information from what’s one of the biggest players around.
