By holding back game releases in another territory you create envy among gamers which can lead to piracy, note Valve.
They’ve found ”piracy rates dropped off significantly” in Russia thanks to releasing titles at the same time. There are ”tons of undiscovered customers,” and game DLC should be free.
By giving away updates and extra content free for games, Valve’s Jason Holtman said they saw spikes in sales for several titles - like the character class addition to Team Fortress 2.
”There’s a big business feeling that there’s piracy,” says Holtman. ”Pirates are underserved customers.”
”When you think about it that way, you think, ‘Oh my gosh, I can do some interesting things and make some interesting money off of it.’”
”We take all of our games day-and-date to Russia,” speaking of Valve. ”The reason people pirated things in Russia,” he explains, ”is because Russians are reading magazines and watching television – they say ‘Man, I want to play that game so bad,’ but the publishers respond ‘you can play that game in six months…maybe.’ “
”We found that our piracy rates dropped off significantly,” Holtman noted, in his interview with GameDaily.
Piracy in games, movies, music and software will always exist because as long as something is available for free there’s going to be demand. The question is can the publishers do more to help convince consumers their efforts are justified in price?
Valve seems to think so.
