With DRM becoming increasingly draconian and scumbag companies like Starforce being paid by companies to infect their customers' machines with highly invasive copy protection (not to mention insult their customers when they go looking to Starforce for customer service), it's nice to see that some game companies "get it": if you don't treat your customers like thieves, chances are, they won't be.

Stardock had great success with this recently when they released Galactic Civilization 2 without copy protection, and now it looks like Valve is going to get in the act with Steam. Of course, Steam is a form of copy-protection, but Valve recently recognized at GDC the entire "lend the disc to your friends" aspect of gaming. Even more refreshingly, they didn't equate that practice with thievery, but instead announced they intend to build a "buddy system" into Steam that allows customers to give their friends free trials of their games.

Newell: One of the things that we really want to do is help people to get their friends to try our games. It's a high priority right now for us to put all of the pieces [for that to happen] in place. If you bought a copy of one of our games you can give five trials to your friends. You type in your e-mail address and then you'll see the first time that they play you'll have this little screen where you can say, "Oh look, he's playing. Oh, he hasn't played yet so I'm going to delete him and replace him with somebody else." And give your friends a chance to play. It's a multiplayer game. You get notified as soon as they start playing so you can jump in. That's the kind of thing we think is going to be super valuable at making that connected customer experience more effective.

Excellent. Let's just hope this system works a hell of a lot better than Steam's other buddy list... you know, the one that hasn't worked in two years.

Game Informer Online interviews Valve [Game Informer]