Valve: Piracy Is More About Convenience Than Price

The people selling them know that they can risk cash on a new game; if it's bad they can sell it secondhand and buy something else. Stopping sales of secondhand games (which is something that some people want to do; and is something that is clearly happening) stiffs the customer. You buy the right to use the content, but you may never ever transfer that right.

This desire to restrict what people can do with content is baffling to most customers yet rife within industry.

When Disney were shown domestic video players they were worried that you could not tell how many people were in the room watching the video; how could you charge people to watch a movie if you didn't know how many people were watching it? See also their attempts to create a "watch once" video.

And all this inconvenience to real customers - people who want to buy games (and who need to sell them second hand to afford it) has zero impact on pirates. I suspect (but have no evidence) that it doesn't send any money to the people creating the games either.

Today, installing a game you bought is harder than pirating it. You have to activate it, type in a 25 digit code you found on the box (wait, is that a B or a 3? Damnit.). It'll need an internet connection to activate, but the activation server is usually overloaded and doesn't work on launch day. Then it wants to patch itself before letting you play, because the stuff you got on the DVD you bought is actually out of date by the time you get home. You also have to sign up for some stupid web service that you never wanted, and have another login and password that you must not forget (or else you can't play anymore and your savegames are gone with it). Except if it's GFWL (Microsoft's Games for Windows Live). Then you also have to figure out why that damn thing gets stuck in an update loop and makes you log into things just to play an entirely offline, single player game (then you have to install xliveless, which avoids that). Pirating is so much easier. You torrent the thing, unpack it and play, just the way it should be.

I'm glad Gabe Newell gets this, and it's apparent in Valve's Steam (except for some reason they permit GFWL infested games, but at least they warn you about it).

Sounds like the same knee-jerk reaction. (Which usually shows you haven't really understood what I'm proposing.) If the consequences are greatly separated in time from detection, and there is strong bias towards false negatives, then the result will be to give the cracked copies a reputation as an incomplete, half-baked piece of crap.

In any case, DRM should never manifest as anything resembling a bug in the game. It should only manifest as a failure of the pirates to do their job and reduced access to online and downloadable content. Remember, guerrilla warfare is about the long term and not the short term. In the short term, there are defeats and retreats for the smaller force, but in the long term, the larger force is persuaded that the effort is no longer worth the reward.

Absolute containment is the essential failed strategy of regular armies taking on the guerrillas. It's also the source of everything you find objectionable about DRM. (Analogy: the armed force that's unpopular with the local population.)

At the sale prices I would think that the convenience of being able to download it from Steam would outweigh not being able to re-sell it for you.