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I've commented this quote from Gabe Newell on HN before, it appears this article predates the quote.

"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem”



Not sure how accurate this quote is, and I agree that it is mainly a service problem, but a pricing problem is a giant chunk of it too. Otherwise Steam wouldn't have such a significantly different regional pricing on games.

Pick any AAA game on Steam, and then check its price on SteamDB for each region (SteamDB provides a nice table for it, so you don't need to bother with VPN and checking it on Steam manually yourself). For example, here is one for the recent Yakuza game[0]. $59.99 in the US, $27.61 in Russia. I can pretty much guarantee that without that kind of regional pricing, the sales in Russia for Steam games would be many mani magnitudes lower.

0. https://steamdb.info/app/1235140/


Interestingly, they used to have to different EU price regions, which is not legal [0]

[0] https://screenrant.com/valve-fined-9-million-eu-geo-blocking...




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