With Steam, which is owned by game maker Valve, recently launching its “Perils of Summer” sale series, countless gamers have downloaded new and old favorites at steep discounts, even overloading Steam’s servers in many areas (including mine).
For game makers, Steam has been a boon. Though Valve keeps its sales figures closely guarded, anecdotal evidence has been strong that Steam has been successful at turning would-be pirates and downloaders into legitimate customers. Though piracy is still a problem in the PC gaming world, Steam has helped spearhead a renaissance of PC game development, especially among indie developers.
But while Steam has been great for game makers, what about other kinds of content creators? Is there anything that Steam can teach others who sell content, or even just distribute it for free?
There are five easy lessons that I see that s team can show all of us. if we are willing to listen.
1. DRM Can Work
Though DRM is the whipping boy of tech circles, one thing that often gets overlooked is that Steam is a form of DRM in its own right. One has to be logged into their Steam accounts to play their games and it certainly places restrictions on how one can copy/play purchased games in a bid to prevent piracy.
However, people don’t notice Steam’s DRM because it doesn’t prevent people from doing things that they want to do with their legally purchased content. For example, you can install steam and all purchased games on more than one computer, though you can only be logged in on one at a time. This is something you often can’t do with physical games.
Since Steam doesn’t actually prevent people from doing the things they want to do, most don’t even notice that the DRM component is there. In fact, the DRM of Steam actually adds features, including the ability to store saved games in the cloud and earn achievements, things that wouldn’t be available without some control over who is playing the game.
In short, DRM can work, but only if it is a net positive for the consumer, not just the creator. This is something that all content creators need to realize, that the consumer’s experience has to come first, the anti-piracy functionality second.
2. Convenience is Key
One of the great things about Steam is how convenient it is. In fact, buying a game off of Steam is almost always easier, faster and more reliable than trying to pirate it elsewhere.
Steam works very much like iTunes does for music, making it easy to browse, buy, download and play content, all within a single interface. This reaches out directly to those who pirate content to avoid the hassle of driving to the store or re-entering all of their information on another shopping site.
While this does mean anti-piracy work is important because it is part of the reason pirating content is more difficult than buying it legally, it also means it isn’t crucial to eliminate every available copy of a work, just increase the effort required to pirate content until it is higher than the effort required to buy it legitimately.
3. The Power of Sales
Steam sales are the stuff of legends and they work. According to Steam’s own numbers, a 10% sale on a game increases the sales of the game (in real dollars) by 35%. Likewise, a 75% sale increases game sales by a whopping 1470%.
Sales are powerful tools in marketing and are especially useful at swaying consumers away from free but less-desirable alternatives.
This is not to say that game prices or other content prices should be set to a fraction of what they are, that defeats the purpose of having a sale, but it does show that content creators need to open up to offering special deals and experimenting with price to compete with illegal-but-free copies.
4. The Importance of Bonus Features
To touch back on the Steam-only features such as saving games in the cloud, leaderboards and achievements, it is important to note that these are features pirates of the game don’t have access to.
Compare this to DVD and CD pirates who often feel they get a better experience, video game pirates, at least those who pirate Steam games, get a clearly inferior one.
This can be easily worked into just about any kind of content for sale, by providing support or other services only to legitimate customers or access to resources only available to purchasers.
Simply put, if pirates get a better experience, more people will pirate, rightly or wrongly. Every content creator needs to realize that.
5. Community, Marketing and Support
Finally, in an area that is much harder to nail down than the others, one thing Steam has done increidbly well is market itself and build a strong community around its product.
On Steam’s forums they have thousands of members discussing nearly every single game available on the service. Furthermore, it’s the go-to place to find and actually talk with members of Steam’s staff and to get both community and official support for various issues related with the service.
But the community goes far beyond that as Steam’s loyal customers have been aggressive, almost evangelical at times, about promoting Steam elsewhere on the Web, including their blogs and on social neworking/news sites. For example, Steam has some 170,000 people liking it on Facebook and social news sites such as Reddit are almost always inundated with submissions regarding Steam, especially during Steam sales.
This has helped Steam grow and build a good reputation for itself and that, in turn, has made it easier to turn pirates who often use the “sticking it to the man” excuse when downloading content illegally.
This is something any site can and should do as a focus on community and social networking is almost never a bad thing. Though it might seem odd to be in a reputation battle with pirate sites, it is important to remember that they are seen by many as giving their visitors what they want, at any price, making them a “robin hood” that can be very hard, but not impossible, to compete with.
Bottom Line
To be clear, Steam isn’t the single answer for all content creators nor is it a perfect solution that is going to bring about a magical end to piracy. As mentioned in my previous post about the Humble Indie Bundle, fighting piracy is less about eliminating it and more about reducing it so that it doesn’t create a drain on the business.
It is a tough balance and PC gaming firms still have it far from perfect. In fact, in December 2009 alone, an estimated 10 million illegal copies of PC games were downloaded, and that was only tracking some 200 games on popular file sharing networks.
PC gaming certainly has not reached any kind of anti-piracy nirvana but it is almost certainly significantly closer than it was thanks to Steam.
The progress may not be great, but it is progress nonetheless and, when such headway can be found, it is crucial for other content creators to take a look at it and see what can be gleaned from it.
You may also like -
Thanks for the insightful post and linking to my blog. Fun to see people actually reading my stuff
of course a factor in the success of Steams DRM model is that unlike games, music has transcended platforms. Games are by their very nature tied to the platform they are written for, music is not, it comes from a place outside platforms. This is why DRM on music was met with such fierce resistance, suddenly it mattered what store you bought your music from after years of not being a factor at all. Steam has an advantage here when it comes to DRM acceptance. Steam
That's a good point. However, it's also worth noting that most of the DRM debacles lately have been around PC gaming, such as the Ubisoft one for starters. While it is true that PC games had a head start over music and movies when it comes to DRM acceptance, there are still many bad ways to fall flat in this area.Still, I agree, PC games have a head start and one they should definitely capitalize on…
Ubisoft’s new model is actually rather cunning, offering a ton of online features for a game that you have to be connected with a legitimate account to use is probably the best DRM strategy out there. Of course games should have offline play mods that don’t require internet access to use (as with Steam, which requires that you go online to play offline, sort of defeats the purpose). As we all know internet connections go down from time to time, and for lap top players and gamers on the go it can get spotty.
While I agree that it is a great DRM model, the problem is that it can also be used to prevent otherwise legitimate resale. I can’t resell my games, even if the law lets me, because the new buyer won’t have access to all of the content, just the limited material on the disk.
It also may be a situation where we are heading to games that aren’t sold on a disk but rather that the disk is access to works that exist elsewhere, access that can be revoked upon resale.
Just another viewpoint…
You've got a great site. Keep up the good work! Glad you liked the post!
it's not just PC gaming, consoles like the X-box, PS3 or Wii have a headstart as well. DRM is incorporated in the design and not annoying at all. I am still weary of the concept of DRM, but at least I can see why it works for some forms of media. doesn't steam have the option to resell/gift older games?
Agreed there as well. As far as Steam reselling/gifting older games, I can't seem to find that function. I know you can buy a new copy as a gift, but I can't, for example, gift my existing copy of Half-Life to my wife, who shocked me last night by saying she's never played it.Fortunately I'll just gift her a $1.99 copy but that's a separate issue.That being said though, you can't really give or resell PC games regardless. They are very different from console games in that regard.
Yeah we quit offering pc games in our library because of the problems in that regard, it's all console games. Sadly, these tend to come with those nasty unlock codes these days for content that's on the disk, that's an annoying copy/resale protection trend to be honest.
Yeah, there's been a nasty war brewing here for some time. Resellers are going to have an uphill battle over the next few years as game makers work to make it harder and harder to stay in business, which is a pity. They already use DLC and unlock codes to push people to buy new games, but it is going to get worse and unfortunately more common, creating a much worse experience for consumers. Perhaps they need a lesson from Steam too…
What a load of shit, Steam won’t even let me play without running it’s intrustive draconian malware like program in the background, and I have to connect to the internet to even launch my games through it’s piece of shit launcher. The only reason anyone goes with steam over Impules is because Steam has a virtual monopoly over the digital downloads market and won’t give it up.
Oh by the way STEAM DOESN’T STOP PIRACY there are already a ton of steam games with cracks and pirated torrents on the internet, anyone who thinks steam works as DRM is Derpaderrr dumb.
Valve should win a Con-Artistry award for conning so many Publishers and Developers into believing the golden lie that Steam prevents Piracy. Steam doesn’t prevent Piracy, period. If anything at this point in time a Steam Exclusive title is more likely to get Pirated more than a title that uses multiple distributors.
Valve cooks the books to con publishers into using their service exclusively based on the absolute fairy tale that they prevent piracy. Fact is Steam games are pirated on launch date now, as DRM Steam is absolutely worthless. The only reason Valve even keeps up this farce is so that they can keep a virtual monopoly on the digital distribution market for a few years longer and con small developers and publishers out of outrageous distribution fees.
As a game distributor with a large market Steam may be a good thing, but as a tool to combat piracy it hold no value.
Please forgive the redundant ‘more’
lol…funny…steam stops piracy…you smoking something heavy…place bittorent and every game name in steams collection and tell me that again. Do you like work for steam or are just that unaware of the reality of piracy?
I didn’t say Steam stops piracy anywhere in the article and I don’t think it outright stops it. But by giving people good, convenient and feature-rich choices to buy content legally, piracy is lessened greatly. Most people who pirate games and other content do so for convenience and cost reasons, not ethical ones. Meet those needs, the problem shrinks drastically.
[...] outdated. If that is the case, then there are similar deals for DD games on PSN and XBL. Really? 5 Piracy-Fighting Lessons From Steam for All Content Creators Originally Posted by CerebralTiger What comparison am I supposed to be looking at? You [...]
[...] even realize it’s there.DRM’s Success StoriesValve Sofotware’s Steam platform, as we’ve talked about before, is possibly the most popular and the most-liked DRM system on the planet.The reason is simple: [...]