Valve: Fight Piracy And Secondhand Market With Good, Supported Games
Posted by x3sphere at July 31, 2009, 8:11 pm
Retailers often get flak from publishers for capitalizing on used game sales, an argument that does have its merits, depending on what side of the fence you’re looking from. Valve believes there is a way to combat the secondhand market and piracy in one fell swoop, and that’s by developing good, supported games. Speaking to website Destructoid, company marketing VP Doug Lombardi explains:
We always see these overall numbers, like how much money GameStop’s making per year off of used game sales, but we really don’t have a breakdown of details for those. I don’t personally know, after being at Valve since Half-Life 1, how many copies of our games per year are sold used, and on the PC versus the 360, so I think there’s a certain amount of information that’s missing, sort of like piracy. I think a lot of folks cry piracy when a game fails to hit their forecast and it may or may not be part of the problem, and it may or may not be all of the problem, but I think to throw any one reason at any problem is probably a mistake, considering the lack of information on both fronts.
Having said all that, though, I think that it’s probably true to say that gamers tend to have affinity for the games that they like, so if you’re doing your job and making a good game, and providing a high level of service for that game at the time of release and post-release, I’m guessing you’re probably less of a victim of piracy and trade, because people want to have the full copy, the legal copy, and have all the updates.
Not exactly a solution that’s easy to pull off, but we full agree with Lombardi, it does work. Valve always makes a point to cater to its fans, whether by releasing daily updates or including requested community features. Take a look at TF2 for instance, it has radically changed in terms of gameplay and scope since its inception. You don’t see that level of support with most titles out there today.
Valve: Fight used sales by making good, supported games [Destructoid]
Read more: Chris Taylor: Piracy Hurting PC Platform, Valve: Left 4 Dead Could Come To PS3, Valve: Left 4 Dead Could Come To PS3, 50-50 Chance, Crytek “Suffering” From Piracy, No More PC Exclusives, Half Life 2: Episode 3 Might Not Arrive Until 2010
I absolutely agree with this. There are certain games that you just HAVE to buy new, because you know they are up to standard and will be supported by their devs... all the Valve games come to mind. People may be unhappy that they're already releasing a sequel to L4D, but their games are still solid nonetheless.
Unfortunately you have devs like Flagship that released Hellgate: London in a terrible state and never recovered... yet the game was so hyped and was being heralded as the second and third comings of Jesus.