Valve‘s leadman Gabe Newell had a little chat with Penny Arcade recently. Valve has always had the reputation of being on the side of gamers, but now they are standing together with us even stronger than I would have expected. As we know, DRM is a big issue in PC-gaming. At the very least it is a hinderance and, at worst, can out-right kill the ability to play the game. A prime example has been Ubi-soft‘s Assassin’s Creed 2.

Now back to Gabe.

Gabe has come out with the following statement about the demonic protection game companies use: “You know, it’s a really bad idea to start off on the assumption that your customers are on the other side of some sort of battle with you.” That’s a smart consumer perspective on Valve’s part. Usually companies tend to look it from their own perspective, but Valve is the least hostile towards gamers than any company out there.

He continues: “We tend to try to avoid being super dictatorial to either customers or partners. Recently I was in a meeting and there’s a company that had a third party DRM solution and we showed them: ‘Look, this is what happens, at this point in your life cycle your DRM got hacked, right? Now let’s look at the data, did your sales change at all? No, your sales didn’t change one bit.’”

Or, even worse, the company might have lost money, because we don’t want this insane DRM brick wall in front of us. The DRM often hurts legit gamers more than those who hack the game. I know I have always had a douting mind about Valve due to their power, but this shows, at least at this moment in time, that Valve actually has our interests in mind. What do you think? I can guess that a lot of people will be happy with Gabe’s talk, but what should be the best approach to keep games secure and accessible?

Source: PC-gamer