Monica Harrington is one of the founders of Valve, the company behind the dominant PC platform Steam. She now tells from the early days of the platform, from 2000, and that her then 19-year-old nephew of the company hunted a big horror. He confronted her with a new phenomenon: pirated copies. What if half-life appears and Valve does not make any money because the game is simply copied?
What did the 19-year-old do at the time? Monica Harrington has now told an anecdote at the GDC developer conference: in the early years of Steam, around 2000, she had given her 19-year-old nephew over $ 500, which was around € 850 today. The money should be for school.
But the 19-year-old did not pretend the money to buy things for the schools: the boy bought a CD burner and sent his aunt a loving thank-you message.
He said how happy he was now copying his games and sharing with his friends. This triggered moderate panic at Valve.
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Valve saw his entire business model in danger through pirated copies
This is how it arrived at Valve: Monice Harrington, Steam’s first marketing woman at the time, says:
I knew he wasn’t a bad boy, but there was apparently a generation change and this new copying technique. All of this put our whole business model in danger.
Harrington says that all the games, including half-life, came out as a CD. Consoles like the Playstation had built -in copy protection, but the PC had nothing:
Because of players like my nephew, we implemented measures so that customers had to authorize themselves. Customers had to confirm and register their product directly at Valve. The gamers were quickly in the forums and released a flood of complaints: the game does not work!
Players scolded the first copy protection: the game is not possible!
So the first attempts for copy protection arrived: When the many public complaints arrived, the game did not run because of the digital copy protection, Valve sweat.
Was there technical problems? Was something wrong with the expiry of the registration?
Founder Mike Harrington, her husband, got into stress. Apparently he thought there was a mistake with the new system. Her husband tried to reach everyone who complained about the practice:
It came out: none of those who complained, their game did not work, the game had actually bought half-life. The authentication system, according to Monica Harrington, went well.
This is how she sees the anecdote today: Monica Harrington protects her nephew in conversation with PC Gamer. Back then she wanted to tell him, ‘What are you doing – don’t you know what you do?’ But he thought nothing bad.
It is 19, who is not thinking of companies, business models or copyright.
When he wanted to apologize later, his aunt told him how valuable the experience with him then was.
For them, the anecdote with its nephew is something that has been accompanying it for 25 years. Her husband, Mike Harrington, says that he had already thought about an authentication system without the nephew.
Even if the history of the Harrington couple at the first copy protection attempts at Steam were 25 years ago, not much has changed on the front. Copy protection is still a huge topic among the players today: Denuvo is sorry for the toxic criticism by gamers: “You have a problem with us because our solution works”