Steam makes it "very hard for people to pirate", says Valve

Speaking at last night's Steam Cloud announcement event at Valve's US offices, Gabe Newell said Steam itself was a great motivator for people to buy the games they want to play.

"We've got great facilities that make it very hard for people to pirate," he said.

"And more importantly, the service value of having an ongiong relationship with us is high enough that it causes people to not be very interested in piracy. It's a dangerous thing to pirate one of our games because later on, when we catch you, you lose all your games, or you can't play multiplayer."

You can read a live-blog of the announcement of Steam Cloud - a system that remotely backs up saved data and configuration of Steam games onto remote servers - over at RPS.

Thanks, Eurogamer.