Valve vs. Other Game Developers

I don't get it. So Valve doesn't care about piracy and just cranks out more games? If so, then I guess I get it. Piracy is inevitable, so just publish more games that people are willing to buy.

Valve doesn't "crank out more games." Quite the contrary, they haven't cranked out anything really recently. They, unlike other developers, invest more into their game communities and fixing and improving their games once released. Also, it helps that they have a digital distribution service of their own that makes piracy kind of a moot point (when you have to have a steam account with a valid licence tied to it for some games). They also have done very little to piss off their fan base, as opposed to some other publishers/developers.

The key to defeating piracy is to not suck. Valve has figured this out. Other developers need to learn that if they put more of their resources into not sucking than into blocking piracy, people will steal their games less. We don't mind paying for stuff. It just has to not suck.

The only "cure" for piracy would be to shut down the big 7 or 8 torrent sites just like they did with the Metallica v. Napster case. Technically they didn't shut down Napster, but pretty much destroyed it by having it take down alot of its copyrighted music. If we could ever get them filthy Swedes on board with cracking down on piracy, then we'd be alright :p. Swedish fish are o.k.

Wait a minute, are you being sarcastic or something cause 12 years after Napster and music piracy is still rampant.

No sarcasm, just saying that metallica and the music industry killed napster itself...

Okay, you said that the only "cure" for piracy is to shut down torrent sites then you state the Napster case as an example. I'm just stating that it's a bad example because years after the case people are still pirating music. I don't think shutting down the big torrent sites would work because of the way p2p downloading works. I'm sure you know that none of the files are hosted on the sites themselves but on users' computers that are willing to seed the files.

I take it many of the GR staff are Redditors? Have an upvote. Or thumbs up. Or whatever.

Heres valve's secret kotaku.com/5800071/valves-secret-to-making-better-video-game​s

I highly doubt a game NEEDS to be priced at $64.99. Maybe if game prices were lower and more modest they would have more people buying them instead of downloading. Also, who wants to spend that kind of money on the majority of games today? They have 6-10 hours of gameplay for $60-70. Not worth the price.

For this reason I purchased Gamefly. In the less than 2 months I've had it, I've had over $200 (according to gamestop.com used prices as of this post) worth of games rented. Some of them I found out I didn't like. Glad I didn't waste my money on garbage.

Other companies use anti-piracy measures, Valve does what I consider pro-consumer measures.
- Buy a game on Steam, it's tied to your account, so you can download it on as many computers as you want. Still need to be signed in to use it, but that's a minimal complaint.
- Constant sales, and really, really good ones. Like the current Summer Sale.
- VAC that bans cheaters from ALL of their bought games. Or at least the ones developed by Valve, I could be forgetting something.
- Their games have dedicated server support, meaning more admins to deal with aimbotters and speedhackers.

Valve is a cut above the rest.

second that motion

Hey, good point about Valve, they don't seem to Steam anybody.