Valve president bashes DRM

Valve president Gabe Newell has posted his critical take on DRM online:

“As far as DRM goes, 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). 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.”

Valve is best known for their hugely popular game ‘Counterstrike’. Valve combats piracy via consumer friendly DRM, but more importantly, by using their online platform Steam.

This approach seems to work better than the approach used earlier by EA when publishing Spore. The agressive DRM in Spore led to huge consumer backlash, which ultimately forced EA to tone down the DRM.