Responding to a letter from a fan, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell left no doubt about his company's stance on DRM, claiming such strategies "are just dumb." The fan letter expressed concern about Valve's publishing partnership with Electronic Arts, which has recently faced outrage from consumers over its use of secuROM DRM in a number of games.
Valve's partnership with EA didn't restrain Newell from commenting on some of its anti-piracy ideas, though, mirroring what appears to be a common sentiment among gamers: "The goal should be to create greater value for customers through service value (make it easy for me to play my games whenever and wherever I want to), not by decreasing the value of a product (maybe I'll be able to play my game and maybe I won't)."
He added that Valve really discourages other developers and publishers from using the broken DRM offerings and in fact claims there is a groundswell to abandon those approaches - even though DRM seems to only be getting more ubiquitous, with Rockstar being the latest to employ SecuROM in the PC version of Grand Theft Auto 4.