It seems like more and more people lately are coming to the same conclusion as Gabe Newell of Valve about piracy as a service problem. Paul Tassi has an op-ed on Forbes in which he points out that no matter what Hollywood and other media industries do, they will never manage to stomp out piracy through legislation. It’s already illegal in most of the world, but that hasn’t slowed it down much. Right now, Tassi writes, pirates have a big advantage over commercial interests in how easy it is to download and view their media. The editorial mostly applies...

How are digital media changing our buying habits? They are changing them, there’s no question, but we often don’t think about how. But something that’s happened over the last few days has led me to think about it. Of all electronic forms of media, I think that computer games (and other software, true, but I’m focusing on games here) are one of the most closely related to e-books, though perhaps they’re a little closer to digital music. As with books and music, they used to come solely on physical media that we buy not for the physical medium...

Valve is one of the major players in the gaming arena: Valve: Piracy is a 'non-issue': "Managing director says piracy is a "service problem."Gabe Newell, Valve managing director, has claimed that software piracy is a "non issue" for the company's Steam gaming service. Instead, he said that the fundamental misconception about piracy is that it is motivated by price, when Value believes that its more down to problems with service."For example, if a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24/7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come...

The dichotomy between physical and electronic delivery of media doesn’t just strike the book world. As I’ve noted a few times in the past, computer games have also been moving to electronic delivery, most notably via Valve’s Steam system, but other companies such as GameStop have been trying to roll their own as well. Digital delivery of games can allow game publishers to do some interesting things. For instance, buying any Valve game box in the store includes a free Steam-based on-line version of it that players can download forever even if they lose the retail disks, Also,...

As the biggest digital outlet for a medium that used to be sold solely physically, Valve’s Steam game distribution, multiplayer-matchmaking, and instant-messaging portal is often useful for drawing parallels to other e-media distribution schemes, such as e-books. But sometimes the differences stand out more. Many games that are integrated with Steam, such as Call of Duty, Fallout, Left 4 Dead, and so on, are still sold in physical disc-in-box form in brick-and-mortar stores. Today MCV reports that two unnamed major British retail outlets are threatening to stop carrying Steam-enabled games unless the publishers remove Steam functionality from them. The...

Adrian Hon has a post on today’s Telegraph warning of trouble ahead for publishers. The recent wave of e-book readers has made e-book piracy easier and more tempting than ever. Hon writes about having bought the 627-page hardcover of the latest Iain Banks Culture novel, but not wanting to have to lug the hefty thing back to the office again—so he googled for an EPUB that he could download to his iPad. It only took him 60 seconds to download the file, and another five minutes or so to put it on his iPad and iPhone. While he...

In some of my previous posts, I have looked at the computer game industry (especially Valve, with its “Steam” digital distribution service and focus on customer service that can even turn pirates into paying customers) with an eye to the examples it sets for the e-book and publishing trades. It turns out I’m not the only one who thinks like that. Paul Rhodes has posted on the Bookseller’s “FuturEBook” blog about the uses of new tablet and smartphone technology that he saw at the European “GamesCom” video game industry trade and consumer show. Rhodes notes that, perhaps surprisingly,...

In a related note to the previous story, Engadget points to an NPD report cited by Joystiq on the computer game market noting that nearly half of all computer games sold in 2009 were downloaded via digital distribution networks (21.3 million) rather than bought in boxes from retail outlets (23.5 million). Steam topped the list of top five digital retailers, followed by Direct2Drive and Blizzard.com. In this, the computer game industry joins the music, movie, and of course book industries as digitally-delivered content begins to displace that which is sold or rented more traditionally. However, new GameStop...

Recently, Valve took a page from stores that release free e-books, such as Baen or Amazon: it released a complete game, and all necessary development materials for the game, entirely free through its Steam digital distribution system. Alien Swarm, from the development team hired to work on Left 4 Dead and Portal 2, does for the Ridley Scott/James Cameron bug-hunt genre what Left 4 Dead did for George Romero and zombies. Players take on the role of one of four space marines investigating a colony overrun with slimy alien creatures. It is a complete, if short...

I’ve previously reported on computer game studio/distributor Valve’s take on fighting piracy by providing better customer service with its Steam distribution platform, and pointed out that e-book publishers and stores could stand to learn a great deal from what Valve is doing and the success it is having. Here is another example. TechCrunch published an anonymous letter from a reader talking about how Steam changed him from a video game pirate to a legitimate consumer—and did so in spite of the DRM restrictions on many of the games sold through Steam. The reader confesses that a large...

I’ve reported on Valve and its Steam platform in the past in ways that were somewhat orthogonal to TeleRead’s primary focus on e-books—mainly focusing on its attitude that customer service fights piracy, and its sensible stance on DRM. That makes it a little amusing to me that now I can finally report on a genuinely-e-book-related matter concerning Steam. Our sister blog GamerTell reports that Valve is now selling digital editions of Prima strategy guides to various games for download via the Steam content management platform. (Actually, I noticed myself the guides were available a couple of days earlier,...

The Wolfire Games Blog has an interesting post about online-only DRM of the sort we mentioned a few weeks ago, that keeps soldiers and others with poor net connections from playing the latest Ubisoft games. Wolfire points out that Valve created a very similar system in the form of Steam, the on-line installer/game catalog through which Valve sells its and others’ games—but with a couple of crucial differences. For one thing, Steam allows people to play its games off-line. For another, Valve added considerable value, making Steam useful to gamers as well as content providers. ...