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Valve's Newell: 'Most DRM Strategies Are Just Dumb'
by Nick Breckon, Dec 02, 2008 2:36pm PSTValve co-founder Gabe Newell left no doubt about his company's stance on DRM in a recent email to a fan.
"As far as DRM goes, most DRM strategies are just dumb," said Newell in an email to gamer Paul Reisinger, which was then picked up by GamePolitics.
"The goal should be to create greater value for customers through service value (make it easy for me to play my games whenever and wherever I want to), not by decreasing the value of a product (maybe I'll be able to play my game and maybe I won't)," he added.
DRM, or digital rights management, has recently become a subject of intense controversy in the PC gaming field. High-profile games utilizing DRM to restrict overall installations, such as EA's Spore and Mass Effect, have been criticized by users and industry figures alike.
Valve requires its boxed games to be activated online initially, but allows for an unlimited amount of installations over a product's lifetime.
"We really really discourage other developers and publishers from using the broken DRM offerings, and in general there is a groundswell to abandon those approaches," concluded Newell.
Comments
Your steam client and games attached to it all suck balls.
While my connection was down for almost 2 weeks (and it's unstable now), I haven't been able to play *any* steam game. When I launch *any* game, it tries to update steam, but I don't have an internet connection to update with, so it just sits there and does nothing.
Steam sucks. Thanks.
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That's customer service. Caring enough to read your players emails, when you know there has to be thousands of them, forwarding them around to the proper place for comment, and getting those people to reply.. That's killer. That create loyalty in a customer and it makes me happy to support them and their games.
Doesn't hurt that their games are insanely fun either :)
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If you were actually worried about that, you could have just activated each one on a different account, then sell the account. Or you could just sell the account in general.
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The current DRM trend is to transform games from products into services - meaning the intention is to let you purchase the game (or, rather, the "right to play it") once and never resale it again. It's funny that Valve has managed to do this - afterall, you cannot resell Steam games - with minimum fuss, and with additional customer value (super fast access to new games, lets me install the games anywhere I want, as many times as I want, manages my game library, etc) while other publishers are just struggling with creating the same results with a bunch of online activation, install limit crap that can only add potential problems for legitimate customers.
Really. Steam is not doing any kind of magic, it just does the trick of giving you easy and fast access, nothing more. It has even additional limits when you compare to old game retail packages (activation, a semi-funcional offline mode), but what it offers as a tradeoff is more than enough to keep most people happy. That's what people want, LESS trouble. How cannot publishers see that and stop beating around the bush is something that never ceases to amuse me. I understand how everybody wants to rule the world, but fuck, offering products in an inferior digital packaging and blaming it on piracy only get you so far.
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There's something to be said for StarDock's position to make games targeted specifically at people who are willing pay for them, but I think a lot of fun games would not have been made if they were trying to filter out the 16-25 crowd. The other counter to that is that unless your studio has a very well established brand, you kind of can't get away with that.
In the end, this is really not an issue of the developers themselves, but the publishers. If a game is from a proven team and they will be big (BioShock, Spore, Mass Effect) they know there will be high demand and thus a lot of piracy. If the game is small, they know that they need to protect their investment returns since the margins will likely be smaller (see World of Goo).
I think that DRM is pretty much here to stay, but unless it is respectful of the actual paying customers it will only serve as an excuse for pirates who will eventually get around it.
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Nailed it.
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