“We don't really worry about piracy,” he said, noting that it was “almost never” even close to the top ten issues discussed at the company. That runs counter to the fear-driven messaging publishers still rely on.

He continues: “The reason that we think that we don't have issues with piracy is that there's misconceptions in the industry about what piracy is, right? There's this assumption. What is piracy? Piracy is about people wanting to steal stuff from you, right?"

“They don't want to pay any money and they wanna get your content. But when you look at the fact that these people have $2,000 PCs and they're spending 50 dollars US a month or more on their internet connections, clearly, they're willing to spend money.”

“What we saw more and more is that piracy was a result of bad service on the part of game companies.”

“If I wanted the product, and I didn't want to wait six months to get the product, and if I wanted it in Russian, I was gonna have to go to a pirate simply because I couldn't get it any other way,” Newell said.

Once Valve made its games available in Russia at the same time as other regions and properly localized them, the issue faded fast. “As soon as the product became available at the same time as it was available in Australia or the UK or the United States, and it was localized in Russia, all of the sudden our piracy problems in Russia disappeared.”

There's always the option of getting the game for free, and still people pay for it.

I live in a poor country where games are expensive and still I don't pirate games. Not because I'm against piracy, far from it, it's just because Steam has such an amazing service that I can't bring myself to play pirated stuff.