Pirates are customers too, says Valve

January 19th, 2009, 19:38 Posted By: Shrygue

via Computer and Video Games

Game developers can make money from the "tons" of naughty kids currently pirating their games, PC juggernaut Valve has said.

Speaking at the Game Business Summit in the US last week, Valve's business and legal affairs director Jason Holtman called game pirates "undiscovered customers".

He said, "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 said of Valve. "The reason people pirated things in Russia is because Russians are reading magazines and watching television. 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 added, explaining that Valve makes sure its games are on the sale in Russian day-and-date with Western Europe.

Game pirates are "tons of undiscovered customers" he concluded because of how narrowly Publishers look at the Western market.

Anyone who's still pirating games, despite the stupidly-cheap prices on Steam, is going to be a hard 'customer' to turn, if you ask us.

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