Valve: Steam will overtake retail, overcome piracy

Posted May 30th 2008 10:00AM by David Craddock
Filed under: Biz

Following the announcement of their free Steam Cloud service yesterday, Valve head honcho Gabe Newell spoke about the confidence he had in the Steam service overtaking retail in sales. According to Newell, Steam has grown by a smashing 200 percent, compared to the retail's traditional spurt of ten percent.

Steam "will actually pass over in the next three months, how much of our business is coming from retail versus how much is coming from other channels," Newell told Eurogamer.

In addition to believing that Steam will boost industry sales as a whole, Newell also believes the service has prevented -- and will continue to prevent -- a great deal of PC software piracy. "We've got great facilities that make it very hard for people to pirate ... It's a dangerous thing to pirate one of our games because later on, when we catch you, you lose all your games, or you can't play multiplayer."

Tags: pc-piracy, piracy, software-piracy, steam, steam-cloud, valve

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

As soon as the prices dip below retail's then maybe it'll overtake it. Right now, retail is still cheaper and you get to resell later on.Posted at 12:36PM on May 30th 2008 by Jason

I agree that prices should be cheaper. Why should something that's digitally delivered - with no box, disc, manual, shipping or warehouse costs - be the same price as a full retail box? However, most games (from my experience) can't be resold. EB/Gamestop doesn't take PC games back, and a lot of them require some form of registration to play. Especially online games. So, I don't really see PC gamers losing on the resale front. Besides, publishers hate the idea of resale since they don't see a penny of that. Therefore, they should be rushing to digital distribution.Posted at 1:02AM on Jun 2nd 2008 by Steven Wong