Valve is a wonderfully open company—in many cases, direct questions sent to the publisher will be answered by a member of the creative team within hours. One gamer recently e-mailed Valve and asked why he saw EA's logo on a commercial for Left 4 Dead: he bought the game via Steam but didn't want to support EA after the Spore DRM debacle. He got a reply from a managing director at the company, Gabe Newell, that was to the point: EA only handles distribution for the physical product, and Valve thinks most DRM is "just dumb."
"Left 4 Dead is developed entirely by Valve. Steam revenue for our games is not shared with third parties. Around the world we have a number of distribution partners to handle retail distribution of our games (i.e. make discs and boxes). EA is one of those partners," Newell wrote. In other words, if you buy Left 4 Dead through Steam, EA doesn't see any of your money. This should be good news for gamers who want to slaughter some zombies but don't want to break their EA boycott.
Newell doesn't have kind words for the use of digital rights managements. "As far as DRM goes, most DRM strategies are just dumb. 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 wrote. "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."
Buying Left 4 Dead on Steam supports Valve, not EA
It's easy for him to say; Steam is its own form of DRM, one that makes programs like SecuROM redundant. "You'd have to ask Valve for specific numbers," PC Gaming Alliance President Randy Stude told Ars, "but I believe piracy on Steam is very low." You can add games you obtained at retail to the Steam service to take advantage of its social networking features, but you need your CD key to do it; cracked games are out of luck. Don't assume that buying a game via Steam means escaping SecuROM however, as EA has included the program on some its own games that it has released via Steam, such as Crysis: Warhead.
If we don't kick you in the gut, can we punch you in the face?
Newell's take attracted the attention of others in the gaming industry. "I think the problem with DRM is not so much the particular method used, but the attitude behind it. It makes us feel like we're all being punished for the sins of the few," Microsoft's Games for Windows Community Manager Ryan Miller wrote on his blog. "It is also pretty clear that most DRM is not a problem for the pirates, just for the legitimate consumers. These two factors combine to make a ton of bad feelings on the consumer side."
This is an arguable sentiment: gamers do care about the method of DRM that is used. Programs such as SecuROM (which don't uninstall along with the game) and limits on the number of installations allowed anger PC gamers. When we reported on the use of SecuROM in Grand Theft Auto IV on the PC, many of our readers pledged not to buy the game on principle.
Miller addresses that controversy directly. "Rockstar has put an interesting twist on the much-maligned software by removing the install limits that have plagued other games, though the software still installs components that can be very difficult to remove should you want them off your hard drive," he wrote. "It seems like a reasonable compromise to me, but what do you think? Is the lack of install limits enough to overlook the installation of code you can't remove?"
This is the sort of question that may sound reasonable from Miller's point of view, but will enrage PC gamers. SecuROM serves no purpose other than to annoy legitimate customers, and a version of the game that lacks the program (and is superior for that) will be available to pirates as soon as the game is released, if not before. The fact that Rockstar won't limit installations, a new twist on DRM that has drawn bile from gamers and seemingly given pirates the high ground, doesn't excuse the use of SecuROM in the game.
While Steam is a step in the right direction, giving gamers the ability to play games on multiple systems without having to worry about losing discs or CD keys, some gamers have reported issues getting their games to work in offline mode, and worry about Valve shutting down the servers at some point in the future. Piracy is a complex issue with no easy answer, but what's clear is that gamers are less and less willing to put up with intrusive DRM technology in their games, but there doesn't seem to be much of a movement to lessen its use among game publishers.
What the industry has to understand is that gamers have the upper hand, as they can simply go to the torrents for a free version of each game that includes no DRM. Until publishers do more to welcome their legitimate customers as friends instead of treating them as potential pirates, piracy will continue to eat at profits and morale.
Valve says DRM is stupid, but Microsoft still doesn't get it
