14 DAY TRIAL // Gabe Newell, the leader of video game developer and Steam creator Valve, has said that his company is constantly trying to offer the best user experience it can in the coming years, regardless of how technology evolves.
When asked about how the traditional model of owning games has been changed by digital distribution services like Origin and Steam, Newell tells Penny Arcade that, “It’s sort of like this kind of messy issue, and it doesn’t really matter a whole lot what the legal issues are, the real thing is that you have to make your customers happy at the end of the day and if you’re not doing that it doesn’t really matter what you think about various supreme court decisions or EU decisions.
“If you’re not making your customers happy you’re doing something stupid and we certainly always want to make our customers happy.”
He says that Valve is known for listening to their own customers when it comes to making decisions, reporting that he always looks at his e-mail messages and passes along the cases he sees there to the relevant departments inside the company.
He also talks about the relationship between piracy, Steam and new consoles, stating, “To us it seems pretty obvious that people always want to treat it as a pricing issue, that people are doing this because they can get it for free and so we just need to create these draconian DRM systems or anti-piracy systems, and that just really doesn’t match up with the data.”
Newell admits that one of the biggest advantages Steam now has is that it offers a customer-oriented experience and that it takes into account feedback from the large user base.
Steam is the PC digital distribution service with the biggest number of subscribers, although competitors like GamersGate, Origin and GameStop are trying to catch up.