Valve spoke about their role in publishing and distributing games in a Game Business Law summit. Gamedaily reported that Valve's Jason Holtman stated that pirates are under served customers. He said:
"There's a big business feeling that there's piracy," he says. But the truth is: "Pirates are underserved(sic) 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," Holtman says 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 says, explaining that Valve makes sure their games are on the shelves in Moscow and St. Petersberg, in Russian, when they release it to North America and Western Europe.
It is an interesting point of view and does make sense. However I think(and as Jason Holtman said), the situation is different in other regions with high piracy rates. I agree that there is potential to monetise pirates if the plan fits with the sensibilities or milieu of a specific region.
This can be seen from micro transaction business models for free to play Asian MMO's(extremely popular in the region). Asia alone is a huge potential market for video games if done right.
The article also briefly touches on Valve's Steam platform and their findings about retail versus digital distribution sales. You can read the entire article here
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