The young relative used a cash gift to buy a CD duplicator instead of spending it for school stuff.
That’s apparently what happened, according to former Valve chief marketing officer Monica Harrington.
“At the time, consumer-level piracy was just becoming a real issue,” Harrington said.
Keep in mind that CDs were the distribution model for PC games decades ago, before digital storefronts existed.
As such, Harrington credits her nephew’s antics for sparking Valve to act with a DRM strategy.
“Because of gamers like my nephew, we implemented an authentication scheme,” said Harrington.
“Customers had to validate and register their copy with Valve directly.
Soon gamers were flooding message boards, and they were saying, ‘The game doesn’t work.'”
Earlier this month, Valve’s digital storefrontSteam broke a new concurrent-players record with over 41.2 million users.
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