Wirehead Studios

http://www.gamedaily.com/articles/news/valve-pirates-are-just-underserved-customers/?biz=1&page=1
VALVE GETS IT!  Finally someone who understands that piracy is bred more from the frustration of wanting to do something that you can't as opposed to a blatant desire to steal!

Hopefully everyone else will wake up and quit blaming consumer greed on piracy, and realize maybe it's their own greed that's screwing them.

I don't know... Steam makes me want to pirate things. Having to purchase multiple copies of a game just to play on my home network is pretty lame. Nintendo doesn't try to force me to buy four copies of Mario Kart just to sit around and play in my living room!

I only have 3 companies in my "good game developers" list and those are:

• vALVE
• iD Software
• Blizzard Entertainment

All the other companies need to prove their worth to make it to the above list (or my original games shelf).

Blizzard is one of the few in mine as well. However, they look to be planning to completely milk StarCraft II by releasing it as three installments. Likewise, I had read that Diablo III will have no LAN option whatsoever. Multiplayer will be done through Battle.net exclusively, which poses problems for me which are similar to that of Steam. Even if I were to buy multiple copies of a game to play with my family in my private home, the necessary bandwidth probably wouldn't actually allow it to work. Several computers sending data back and forth over the same router and ISP without any lag? Forget it. I shouldn't have to worry about junk like that just to play someone sitting two feet away.

Piracy is a scapegoat that developers are using to kill the entire market. They obviously don't like having to develop for the wide variety of PC systems out there and are thus trying to make their transition to consoles as forced looking as possible. Greed and laziness manage to once again ruin something that could be otherwise enjoyable.

There are other game developers that have come out with some pretty good games besides Id and Valve you know.

And one of those happens to be us.. :]

And look where that got Troika... Poor guys. :(

Except I know those 3 have the lowest possibilities to release a bad game.

This is all very well, but I'm not convinced. Steam is part of the problem, not the solution. I have GTR Evolution which is one of the few games where Steam is optional, rather than required. Just as well, because a/ I wouldn't have bought it otherwise since b/ I have NEVER been able to connect to Steam. Ever.

If Valve "got it" they'd let you play offline ...

Wait a second, I never said Steam was the solution.  What Valve "gets" is the motivation behind a lot of software piracy, and that the solution is not to inflict draconian DRM and copy protection schemes but rather to make the software more readily available for legal purchase.  Some are always going to pirate anyway, and you'll never clamp down that crowd so don't bother, but the ones that would purchase but pirate because they're unable to - those are the customers you can reach so why not try more carrot, less stick, and just forget about the ones you'll never sell to anyway.  That's what I've been proposing since the beginning.  That's my only point here.

I wasn't implying that you were saying that, Pho. I'm merely stating that while I agree with most of what Hoffman said in the piece, the fact that Valve are still trying to ram their proprietary crap down people's throats flies in the face of all the lyrical. I agree that 90% of piracy occurs because the end users feel like they've been backed into a corner. There are always going to be freeloaders, but I agree that the carrot approach would tempt many people away from piracy and get the gaming industry back to winning ways. Hey, we might even get a next-gen game that's brilliant AND lasts for more than 10 minutes.