> Our goal is to create greater service value than pirates, and this has been successful enough for us that piracy is basically a non-issue for our company. I

> Our goal is to create greater service value than pirates, and this has been successful enough for us that piracy is basically a non-issue for our company. I think there's an impedance mismatch between this guy's definition of success and that of a lot of other people engaged in business models involving materials covered by copyright. Most of the idiots in these industries think of "success" as "having the most" -- having more of the market than a competitor, having money from as many people as possible, and so on. They are so focused on a comparative measure of "success" that they are probably more willing to operate at a loss than to let anyone "get away" with enjoying what they make without paying for it or to let a competitor operate at less of a loss than them. Gabe Newell, on the other hand, seems to measure success by making enough profits for everyone to benefit, getting people involved in the industry as customers, and having a sustainable business model that is not dependent on the forebearance of the vagaries of momentary changes in circumstance. His company is working on developing a business model that is largely independent of copyright, and is enjoying great success as a result; everyone else is trying to use copyright to punish anyone who isn't buying a product through official channels, including those who are buying a different product instead, and some people who are buying the product, because to them "success" is more about who's prevented from doing what they don't want than about providing value in exchange for a comfortable level of revenue generation that isn't likely to dry up tomorrow. I think saying that piracy isn't about price is overly simplistic. Computer performance is about CPU and RAM and efficient code and storage media seek time and a lot of other things, but in a given circumstance seek time might e the bottleneck; I think that in this case what he has identified is the fact that service and delivered value constitute the bottleneck that creates a piracy "problem" for vendors, and that price is not the major bottleneck in most cases. That's different from price not being "the problem", but it's close enough for government (or journalistic) work.