GameDaily latterly spoke with Jason Holtman, chief of craft advancement and legal affairs for Valve, about online sales and piracy. Holtman took a sudden stance on the latter, effectively taking responsibility for at least a portion of pirated games. Quoting: "'There's a big line feeling that there's piracy,' he says. But the truth is: '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,' Holtman says of Valve. 'The reason people pirated things in Russia,' he explains, 'is because Russians are reading magazines and weight-watching tube — 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." Attitudes like this seem to be prevalent at Valve; last month we talked about founder Gabe Newell's know* that "most DRM strategies are just dumb."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More: - Brought to my attention by

Mark