Home News Games Valve boss sees “groundswell to abandon” DRM

Valve boss sees “groundswell to abandon” DRM

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valve_logo_black.gifDRM is, in our opinion, a bad idea. It’s easily cracked and make
ordinary users lives’ unnecessarily difficult. Anyway, off our soap box
– it seems that the games industry is finally seeing the light.

Valve president and co-founder Gabe Newell reported told one gamer
that there was a "a groundswell to abandon" DRM in PC games.

According to games blog Tech in Hiding, Newell said that most DRM strategies "are just dumb".

"The goal should be to create greater value for customers through
service value (make it easy for me to play my games whenever and
wherever I want to), not by decreasing the value of a product (maybe
I’ll be able to play my game and maybe I won’t)," he reportedly told a fan.

"We really really discourage other developers and publishes from using
the broken DRM offerings, and in general there is a groundswell to
abandon those approaches," he added.

Valve sidesteps the whole issue of DRM by having an online distribution
system (Steam). This system ties games to a single login, which means
that gamers can play games on multiple computers and can upgrade them
as they like (which most dedicated PC gamers do). This system also
manages to kill off piracy as most people don’t share their login
details with others.

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