One weekend, Valve, offered Day of Defeat for free trial. At the end of that weekend, a good offer was made to customers. As expected, this increased digital downloads of the game. But surprisingly, Holtman reveals, there were "28% more units bought at retail than sold through Steam."

"What we learned from having a connected platform, is it's not about channel vs. channel," says Holtman. "You can't predict where people will shop."

Holtman also talks about giving away a character class for Team Fortress 2. Traditional thinking says: "You monetize investments by charging for them." But, he reveals, when Valve gives away it's content, sales spike for several products, both at retail and through Steam.

The final sacred cow that Holtman took a stab at was the issue of piracy. "There's a big business feeling that there's piracy," he says. But the truth is: "Pirates are underserved customers."

"When you think about it that way, you think, 'Oh my gosh, I can do some interesting things and make some interesting money off of it.'"

"We take all of our games day-and-date to Russia," Holtman says of Valve. "The reason people pirated things in Russia," he explains, "is because Russians are reading magazines and watching television -- they say 'Man, I want to play that game so bad,' but the publishers respond 'you can play that game in six months...maybe.' "

"We found that our piracy rates dropped off significantly," Holtman says, explaining that Valve makes sure their games are on the shelves in Moscow and St. Petersberg, in Russian, when they release it to North America and Western Europe.

There are, concludes Holtman, "tons of undiscovered customers," because publishers look very narrowly at the Western market.