Valve boss, Gabe Newell believes he has the answer to p****y
Gabe Newell, the head of Valve, and one of the most revered personalities in the video game industry, has gone on record explaining that p****y is a result of a lack of service availability as opposed to the more common belief that it is because of the cost of the games.
Before delving into Newell’s exact words, it would be better if a bit of context was added. One of the regions where p****y is a predominant issue, apart from Indonesia, is Russia.
Rather than avoid the issue, Mr. Newell decided to tackle it head on and got straight to the point of how public opinion doubted that Valve would survive in Russia.
“You say, ‘oh, we’re (Valve) going to enter Russia, people say, ‘you’re doomed, they’ll pirate everything in Russia’.” It was here that Newell dropped a fairly heavy bombshell when he said, “Russia now outside of Germany is our largest continental European market.”
He went on to elaborate and give reasons why the market in Russia would come out with pirated copies of games, “...the people who are telling you that Russians pirate everything are the people who wait six months to localize their product into Russia.”
Newell also explained that sorting this issue out was a matter of the quality of service provided by Publishers, “It doesn’t take much in terms of providing a better service to make pirates a non-issue.”
Which conveniently brings us to Newell’s slightly more detailed explanation: “One thing that we have learned is that p****y is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue,” and that the best way to counter it was not by implementing antipiracy measures but rather by providing a service which was superior to what the pirates in the region were able to deliver.
Valve proved their point and belief in Newell’s philosophy when they opened a number of kiosks in Russia which would allow gamers to go and pay for content on their online digital distribution platform, Steam, with cash.
Basically, it would give the people of that region direct access to Steam and would also mean that ‘availability’ would not be an issue for the Russian gaming population.
A large number of the members of the gaming community have joined the ‘games are overpriced’ wagon but it seems that the price of the game itself is not the main issue but rather the amount that has to be dished out to purchase the various Downloadable and Add-on content which every publisher seems to announce.
However, Sony have also moved in a manner which supports the Valve boss’s theory as they opened a production plant in the country as well.
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