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If you aren’t into gaming you may not have heard of Steam. Steam, is roughly for games what iTunes is for music. It is a distribution platform, and more broadly, an organizing system—an intentionally arranged collection of resources and the interactions they support. Like the iTunes player itself, you both play, purchase, and manage your games from the Steam desktop application. In many ways it echoes the organization of iTunes and other similar services like Amazon Kindle: storing purchases in the cloud, syncing purchases and game-play across devices (like the PS3), and digital rights management. It bills itself as being the world’s largest gaming platform, and so uniquely also functions as a community for online gaming.

Run buy the gaming company Valve (well known for such critically acclaimed games like the Half Life, Left 4 Dead, and Portal), they set out to create a platform which would patch (update) games automatically and implement better anti-piracy measures. Speaking in an interview in 2011 the Company’s CEO Gabe Newell argued that piracy wasn't a problem for Valve.
 
“In general, we think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. For example, if a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.”

In the rest of the interview summarized here, Newell argued that better service would result in more sales. Valve certainly has built a valuable service in the eyes of consumers. It is very popular with gamers and developers alike. It often sells games for fantastically low prices which encourage users to try out new games and not bother with the hassle of pirating. There are always fantastic deals: yesterday, Steam offered the game Babel Rising at 50% off as part of the daily deal and the game and Risen 2: Dark Waters for 66% off as part of their “Midweek Madness.” Valve also offers its hit game Team Fortress 2 for free on the service. The philosophy of the platform is to provide a better service and it works, as any visit to r/gaming on Reddit will verify.

Organizing systems promote certain types of interactions. The way people are allowed to purchase and consume digital content is an important component of the success of legal distribution systems like Steam and iTunes. Most people will pay if the service is good and the prices reasonable. I would argue that Netflix has done more to stifle piracy than DRM management, especially looking at the fact that the most pirated shows are the ones that aren’t available on Netflix (such as Game of Thrones). Distribution and DRM systems that penalize users for purchasing the product are not good ways of creating a loyal customer following, but rather great ways of encouraging pirating. In designing organizing systems and software we must keep in mind that the barriers and costs we place on interactions will have consequences on sales and the bottom line.