Gabe Newell on video game economics.

The mighty Gaben has sat down recently and spoke about 'how Valve experiments with the economics of video games'. There is a full article about it on geekwire here it is quite an interesting read. He talks about about piracy stating;

"The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates. For example, Russia. You say, oh, we’re going to enter Russia, people say, you’re doomed, they’ll pirate everything in Russia. Russia now outside of Germany is our largest continental European market."

At the end of the day piracy isn't going anywhere and excessive DRM doesn't really stop it, if pirates want to crack a game they will getting round the likes of Ubisofts always online DRM for example, leaving pirates with a nice offline version of whatever game they happened to cracked, while genuine punters that may happen to have an unreliable internet connection can't play the game they paid for, which is generally why people dislike Ubisofts DRM. Anyway I don't want to get in to a full blown rant about that so I'll stop before I do. I must admit because of Valve and Steam I have bought a hell of a lot more games than I normally would have purely due to constant deals on games, games that I may or may not would have pirated if it wasn't for that, I mean I don't pirate games that's illegal. Shhh... Nothing to see here, move along people.

Anyway go read the article linked above.

Ubisofts DRM so successful it's getting removed

Everyone knows about Ubisofts constant online DRM and the majority hate it with a passion. They recently called it a success, as it apparently reduced piracy figures. Or it could be do to the amount of people boycotting the company due to this system whose to say. Anyway with the recent release of a wee little game called 'From Dust' which was apparently not going to have this 'successful' DRM implimented, but ended up having it anyway, thus pissing even more people off. They have now decided this was a bad idea and are now removing it according to a post on their forum. Hopefully this is a sign of things to come and they will start using DRM people have accepted with the likes of Steamworks or GFWL (I know alot of people hate it but I want more gamer points dammit).