Monica Harrington is one of the co-founders of Valve, the company behind the dominant PC platform Steam. She is now recounting the early days of the platform in 2000, when her 19-year-old nephew caused the company great alarm. He confronted them with a new phenomenon: piracy. What if Half-Life is released and Valve makes no money because the game is simply copied?
What did the 19-year-old do back then? Monica Harrington recently shared an anecdote at the developer conference GDC: In the early years of Steam, around the year 2000, she had given her 19-year-old nephew a check for $500, which would amount to about €850 today when adjusted for inflation. The money was intended for school.
However, the 19-year-old did not spend the money on school-related items: instead, the boy bought a CD burner and sent his aunt a heartfelt thank-you message.
He wrote how happy he was that he could now copy his games and share them with his friends. This caused moderate panic at Valve.
Valve saw its entire business model threatened by piracy
This is how it was received at Valve: Monica Harrington, the first marketing woman at Steam back then, says:
I knew he wasn’t a bad kid, but apparently there was a generational shift and this new copying technology. All of that put our entire business model at risk.
Harrington says that back then all PC games, including Half-Life, were released on CD. Consoles like the PlayStation had built-in copy protection, but PCs had nothing:
Because of gamers like my nephew, we implemented measures that required customers to authenticate themselves. Customers had to confirm and register their product directly with Valve. Soon, gamers were in the forums posting a flood of complaints: The game isn’t working!
Players complained about the first copy protection: The game doesn’t work!
So the first attempts at copy protection were received: As the numerous public complaints poured in that the game wasn’t running due to digital copy protection, Valve started to sweat.
Were there technical problems? Was something wrong with the registration process?
Co-founder Mike Harrington, her husband, became stressed. He apparently thought there was a mistake with the new system. Her husband tried to reach out to everyone who complained about the practice:
It turned out that none of those who complained that their game wasn’t working had actually purchased Half-Life. According to Monica Harrington, the authentication system was working well.
This is how she views the anecdote today: Monica Harrington defended her nephew in a conversation with PC Gamer. She wanted to tell him back then, ‘what are you doing – don’t you know what you’re causing?’ But he never meant any harm.
He was 19; he wasn’t thinking about companies, business models, or copyright.
When he later wanted to apologize, his aunt told him how valuable that experience with him was at the time.
For her, the anecdote with her nephew is something that has followed her for 25 years. Her husband, Mike Harrington, says, however, that he had already considered an authentication system without the nephew.
Even though the story of the Harrington couple regarding the first attempts at copy protection with Steam is now 25 years old, not much has changed on that front. Even today, copy protection is a huge issue among gamers: Denuvo is tired of the toxic criticism from gamers: “You have a problem with us because our solution works”
