Generally it’s agreed the best way to stop piracy is by offering a more convenient alternative. I generally for example don’t pirate video games available on Steam. With streaming services being so disjoint and expensive now I’ve gone back to pirating, at least with cable you can bundle channels.
I buy steam games, even ones I’ve already pirated, for a few reasons.
Quick and easy downloads
Seamless updates
Almost all my other purchased games in one place.
Cloud saves
Durability, just knowing my games will be available to download on my next PC for the foreseeable future.
And I pirate just about everything I watch mainly because I’m not willing to play musical subscriptions to watch the shows I want to see at the end of a long day.
If the film industry had a service that offered a similar experience to a Plex share, I’d pay quite a bit for it. But instead they have this system designed to extract maximum value from every viewer, and I’m tired of it.
Gabe Newell was right on the money when he said piracy is a service issue, not a price issue.
To add onto this, when someone who can’t afford something pirates something, there is no lost sale because there never was a sale there to begin with. It didn’t take any money away from the company since they were never going to see any money from that person.
With that said, the only piracy I partake in is for archival purposes, and like you I buy Steam games regardless because it’s too convenient like you said.
Convenience would be knowing whether the show I’ve queued up to watch will remain on the service, or getting warned well ahead of time if it’s going to expire. Or having every season of a serialized show available or at least something showing that not all of it is on the service before you get deep into it and suddenly cut off halfway through. Or easy access to my watch history and likes, as well as more robust settings (or heck, any settings) to tailor the way content is shown so I can get a consistent user experience whether I’m browsing new shows or diving back into the next episode of something.
They could let you share your login with your family members that don’t live in the same house for a start, rather than making them create their own account having to pay $8 (or whatever it is in your country) per family household on my account.
As that person said, it should be like Plex - I pay for access and then I can share it with family without an extra charge. Netflix is now costing me like $50 a month just so myself and some of my family members can watch it. We probably won’t be subscribed for much longer, and will just rely on my Plex library.
Yep, and when netflix took off piracy took a dive because of how good it was. Then every studio decided they wanted their piece of the streaming pie so pulled all their content off netflix and released their own streaming service, so now we’re basically back to having to pay $100 a month to get access to everything, just like we were with cable before netflix changed the game. Shockingly, piracy has shot up again.
These companies are so stupid and greedy.
The only games I’ll pirate are ones that are no longer available to buy, because what else am I supposed to do?
It’s morally positive to pirate games that are no longer available for sale. Piracy is stealing, but in this case, you’re stealing from the void so there’s no harm done, and preserving the game is a morally good thing to do.
For about the same price as it currently costs to bundle all the major streaming platforms. Plus, cable never had anything near the amount of content we have now on streaming.
I think people who compare cable to streaming don’t remember what it was like before streaming
A lot of it is the same we saw with the rise of Steam and the like in gaming
“People are just looking for a more convenient way to buy games and all this DRM is making it easier to pirate. Steam is awesome, but I might need to play in an airgapped environment in Iraq and steam’s offline mode is bad. So I might as well just pirate everything. Fucking Valve”
That said: Tinfoil hat and all, but I really do think the increasing rise of “Ugh, this streaming is so expensive and confusing. I should just get cable” is an astroturfing campaign. Because the two big elements of the SAG side of the strikes are streaming residuals and AI. And the advantage of cable tv is that the networks control who get the residuals. Take a look at where the cast and crew of Friends ended up, and you start to get an idea of why TBS will never stop airing reruns of that show. Same for Seinfeld and, to much lesser extents, Frasier and King of Queens and the like.
Which is why I expect the outcome will be to do hybrid models. And a lot of the current discourse is about making people think they want to have to “record” an episode of Becker rather than just choose to watch wherever they left off as a VOD.
I’m not sure how you mean the last paragraph, but P+ already removed Star Trek Prodigy, and I think it just stopped “airing” so people might rightly want to “record” the show.
It was a genuinely bad show. But Ted Danson is magical and can make the most unlikable and obnoxious sitcom characters into reflections of the soul that stick with you in ways they really shouldn’t.
It isn’t the same, but it is well worth catching some Curb Your Enthusiasm clips on youtube. Ted Danson is a recurring character and his interactions with Larry are magnificent.
And a lot of PC gamers have Stockholm Syndrome when it comes to Steam.
Glacially slow and pathetic customer service. They have an F rating by the Better Business Bureau. Offline mode sucks. And Valve bullies developers into agreeing to exploitative pricing terms:
You know what would fix this? Competition. But when Epic created a game store and implemented the same tactics that Valve is using - Steam fanboys cried.
People don’t really care about these issues - they want their “team” to win.
GOG is good if the game you want is on there. I got the ultimate edition of Fallout New Vegas for like £5. It was like £10-15 on Steam at the time. Great deal. The main issue is they’re strictly anti-DRM for offline games so the bigger developers are less inclined to put their games on there, but whatever.
yeah, exclusives are the big one for me. I choose to game on PC because it’s less bullshit. exclusives decidedly fall into the bullshit category and the EGS is full of them
The way Epic handled competition was by strong-handing exclusives constantly without actually providing a better service. Last time I bought a game from Epic, it didn’t even have a cart system to buy games in bulk. Couple that with the tolerance of cryptocurrency/blockchain and acquisitions of sites like Artstation and Bandcamp, and yeah - people have reasons to not like Epic. I’ve heard stories of people getting locked out of their banks because of the lack of a cart and they were buying a lot of games in a short amount of time. I’ve also heard stories about people’s Epic accounts getting breached because of Fortnite BS.
And I’m saying this as someone who uses multiple launchers. I hated Steam back in the mid-2010s (skipped the middleman and bought GTAV from Rockstar directly) and they were in quite a bad rut with Steam Greenlight and the paid mods fiasco. People were rightfully loudly critical of Steam and at a time, Valve really did not deserve taking a 30% cut. They’ve done a lot since then to recoup that lost trust and deserve the 30% cut, Proton and the Steam Deck being a massive part of that for many people.
People don’t really care about these issues - they want their “team” to win.
Yeah the amount of “No steam no buy” fanboys is absurd. They act like having to open a different program to see their games is like hacking into the matrix. Not to mention that there are already programs like GOG Galaxy that compile all of your games from all your services in to one GUI.
I used to be annoyed about the memory usage of running multiple game launchers but now it’s a bit of a non issue with 32gb ram. I don’t even remember what I had when it was an issue.
I think a much better comparison than Steam would be Spotify.
I use Plex for all my movies and TV shows for the same reasons you mentioned. All my stuff can be in one place instead of having to pay for Netflix, Hulu, Peacock, Disney+, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, and whatever other fucking shit is out there.
Plex also supports music libraries, but I don’t use that feature. Why? Because Spotify has literally 99.9% of all the music I want to listen to, and aside from maybe like Garth Brooks, the other 0.1% is on Youtube. Spotify did it right by just having a basic service that you can pay for and get everything you want. If I had to subscribe to Spotify, Tidal, Napster (Still a thing I guess?), and 4 other services just to access all the music I listen to, I’d go back to piracy.
With Spotify slowly starting to reach a limit in subscribers, it’s unfortunately only a matter of time until they start pulling what Netflix is doing and finding new ways to get money from customers.
What does Bluetooth have to do with it? First there are lossless Bluetooth codecs and even if you don’t use one of them, good source material still helps. Imagine a jpeg that was resaved multiple times to get an idea how artifacts stack.
Spotify’s codec should in theory even be good enough to not be distinguishable from CD quality, but somehow some songs just sound like shit anyway. I suspect it’s a problem with how they were digitised.
I’m using the free version of tidal instead. In the beginning I had a problem with some things not being on there, but that has mostly been resolved.
I’m also just using Sennheiser momentum true wireless 3. No fancy audiophile equipment.
What does Bluetooth have to do with it? First there are lossless Bluetooth codecs and even if you don’t use one of them, good source material still helps. Imagine a jpeg that was resaved multiple times to get an idea how artifacts stack.
Spotify’s codec should in theory even be good enough to not be distinguishable from CD quality, but somehow some songs just sound like shit anyway. I suspect it’s a problem with how they were digitised.
I’m using the free version of tidal instead. In the beginning I had a problem with some things not being on there, but that has mostly been resolved.
I’m also just using Sennheiser momentum true wireless 3. No fancy audiophile equipment.
Plex also supports music libraries, but I don’t use that feature. Why? Because Spotify has literally 99.9% of all the music I want to listen to, and aside from maybe like Garth Brooks, the other 0.1% is on Youtube. Spotify did it right by just having a basic service that you can pay for and get everything you want. If I had to subscribe to Spotify, Tidal, Napster (Still a thing I guess?), and 4 other services just to access all the music I listen to, I’d go back to piracy.
Spotify also has a free ad-supported service, which while it does have ads, isn’t as bad as radio, or needs you to go to the effort of pirating the music you want.
best way to stop piracy is by offering a more convenient alternative. I generally for example don’t pirate video games available on Steam
I have towed this line for years. Recently Battlefield 2042 was available on steam for a great price so I snapped it up. I’d played it at release via a 1 month trial of EA play and it was absolute trash.
The game is totally fixed! The problem I have, is that I bought it on steam…and it forces me to install and keep myself logged in to the EA app anyway. It fails to launch the game every single time. I have to reboot my computer, manually log out of EA and log back in. It is an absolute shitfight, because EA gargle balls all day.
My point is, I bought the game on steam and I got absolutely duped. I’m all for a bigger library, but not if it means I have to install and use the other crappy apps anyway. Such a disappointment, I won’t be so quick to buy on steam anymore unless they implement a great big flashing red warning that the game is not actually on steam at all.
Not big enough, red enough, or flashing enough. I like steam a lot. I don’t like EA one little bit, or battlenet, or any of those other half-built apps.
Yeah, I get that stuff like that sucks. Funnily enough, I think it’s a little better on Linux because the EA games app is incapable of running on Linux so Proton boots it just long enough to get the game working, and then it fades back into the background. While Linux gaming is still not perfect, that kind of thing is one of the reasons I prefer it over gaming on Windows.
Also stopped pirating games when steam came around. And I stopped pirating shows and movies with the rise of streaming services. Now though, I’m looking into standing up a media server.
I respect that. I’m not setting up a media server because I would expose myself to legal liability, but the people brave enough to actually distribute the content I’m consuming have my full respect.
I think Hulu has a decent bundle with Disney, and Paramount with Showtime isn’t bad.
That’s like 4 for 20 bucks. And lots of cell plans come with one free. So it wouldn’t be hard to get a lot of options for 20-40, which is still way cheaper than cable.
Netflix is just starting to get real expensive. If they’d have kept some of their originals from the last couple years I wouldn’t think of canceling, but since they cancel those shows a week after a season drops, I’ll probably drop Netflix soon.
I think with gaming that is a factor, but personally I think the larger deterrent for pirating games is at least for multiplayer games you can’t really pirate them while still being able to play online most of the time.
Generally it’s agreed the best way to stop piracy is by offering a more convenient alternative. I generally for example don’t pirate video games available on Steam. With streaming services being so disjoint and expensive now I’ve gone back to pirating, at least with cable you can bundle channels.
I buy steam games, even ones I’ve already pirated, for a few reasons.
Quick and easy downloads
Seamless updates
Almost all my other purchased games in one place.
Cloud saves
Durability, just knowing my games will be available to download on my next PC for the foreseeable future.
And I pirate just about everything I watch mainly because I’m not willing to play musical subscriptions to watch the shows I want to see at the end of a long day.
If the film industry had a service that offered a similar experience to a Plex share, I’d pay quite a bit for it. But instead they have this system designed to extract maximum value from every viewer, and I’m tired of it.
Gabe Newell was right on the money when he said piracy is a service issue, not a price issue.
To add onto this, when someone who can’t afford something pirates something, there is no lost sale because there never was a sale there to begin with. It didn’t take any money away from the company since they were never going to see any money from that person.
With that said, the only piracy I partake in is for archival purposes, and like you I buy Steam games regardless because it’s too convenient like you said.
And if you really like a game, why not supporting their devs
I don’t think Netflix could get any more convenient than it already is though.
Convenience would be knowing whether the show I’ve queued up to watch will remain on the service, or getting warned well ahead of time if it’s going to expire. Or having every season of a serialized show available or at least something showing that not all of it is on the service before you get deep into it and suddenly cut off halfway through. Or easy access to my watch history and likes, as well as more robust settings (or heck, any settings) to tailor the way content is shown so I can get a consistent user experience whether I’m browsing new shows or diving back into the next episode of something.
I think Netflix could get a lot more convenient.
That’s very fair. My bad, I was narrow-minded and only thought about the UI.
They could let you share your login with your family members that don’t live in the same house for a start, rather than making them create their own account having to pay $8 (or whatever it is in your country) per family household on my account.
As that person said, it should be like Plex - I pay for access and then I can share it with family without an extra charge. Netflix is now costing me like $50 a month just so myself and some of my family members can watch it. We probably won’t be subscribed for much longer, and will just rely on my Plex library.
Yep, and when netflix took off piracy took a dive because of how good it was. Then every studio decided they wanted their piece of the streaming pie so pulled all their content off netflix and released their own streaming service, so now we’re basically back to having to pay $100 a month to get access to everything, just like we were with cable before netflix changed the game. Shockingly, piracy has shot up again.
These companies are so stupid and greedy.
The only games I’ll pirate are ones that are no longer available to buy, because what else am I supposed to do?
It’s morally positive to pirate games that are no longer available for sale. Piracy is stealing, but in this case, you’re stealing from the void so there’s no harm done, and preserving the game is a morally good thing to do.
For about the same price as it currently costs to bundle all the major streaming platforms. Plus, cable never had anything near the amount of content we have now on streaming.
I think people who compare cable to streaming don’t remember what it was like before streaming
A lot of it is the same we saw with the rise of Steam and the like in gaming
“People are just looking for a more convenient way to buy games and all this DRM is making it easier to pirate. Steam is awesome, but I might need to play in an airgapped environment in Iraq and steam’s offline mode is bad. So I might as well just pirate everything. Fucking Valve”
That said: Tinfoil hat and all, but I really do think the increasing rise of “Ugh, this streaming is so expensive and confusing. I should just get cable” is an astroturfing campaign. Because the two big elements of the SAG side of the strikes are streaming residuals and AI. And the advantage of cable tv is that the networks control who get the residuals. Take a look at where the cast and crew of Friends ended up, and you start to get an idea of why TBS will never stop airing reruns of that show. Same for Seinfeld and, to much lesser extents, Frasier and King of Queens and the like.
Which is why I expect the outcome will be to do hybrid models. And a lot of the current discourse is about making people think they want to have to “record” an episode of Becker rather than just choose to watch wherever they left off as a VOD.
I’m not sure how you mean the last paragraph, but P+ already removed Star Trek Prodigy, and I think it just stopped “airing” so people might rightly want to “record” the show.
I haven’t seen that show in so long. It was cancelled way too soon. I may have to, um, acquire it…
It was a genuinely bad show. But Ted Danson is magical and can make the most unlikable and obnoxious sitcom characters into reflections of the soul that stick with you in ways they really shouldn’t.
I liked it, yes, it was because of Ted Danson. I would watch a show where Becker and Dr. Cox from Scrubs just had a sarcasm-off.
Same.
It isn’t the same, but it is well worth catching some Curb Your Enthusiasm clips on youtube. Ted Danson is a recurring character and his interactions with Larry are magnificent.
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And a lot of PC gamers have Stockholm Syndrome when it comes to Steam.
Glacially slow and pathetic customer service. They have an F rating by the Better Business Bureau. Offline mode sucks. And Valve bullies developers into agreeing to exploitative pricing terms:
https://www.eurogamer.net/new-lawsuit-accuses-valve-of-abusing-steam-market-power-to-prevent-price-competition
You know what would fix this? Competition. But when Epic created a game store and implemented the same tactics that Valve is using - Steam fanboys cried.
People don’t really care about these issues - they want their “team” to win.
Why can we buy games cheaper on other services then?
Steam works and the prices are good and I don’t see them buying exclusives. That’s good enough for me nothing is perfect.
GOG is good if the game you want is on there. I got the ultimate edition of Fallout New Vegas for like £5. It was like £10-15 on Steam at the time. Great deal. The main issue is they’re strictly anti-DRM for offline games so the bigger developers are less inclined to put their games on there, but whatever.
yeah, exclusives are the big one for me. I choose to game on PC because it’s less bullshit. exclusives decidedly fall into the bullshit category and the EGS is full of them
The way Epic handled competition was by strong-handing exclusives constantly without actually providing a better service. Last time I bought a game from Epic, it didn’t even have a cart system to buy games in bulk. Couple that with the tolerance of cryptocurrency/blockchain and acquisitions of sites like Artstation and Bandcamp, and yeah - people have reasons to not like Epic. I’ve heard stories of people getting locked out of their banks because of the lack of a cart and they were buying a lot of games in a short amount of time. I’ve also heard stories about people’s Epic accounts getting breached because of Fortnite BS.
And I’m saying this as someone who uses multiple launchers. I hated Steam back in the mid-2010s (skipped the middleman and bought GTAV from Rockstar directly) and they were in quite a bad rut with Steam Greenlight and the paid mods fiasco. People were rightfully loudly critical of Steam and at a time, Valve really did not deserve taking a 30% cut. They’ve done a lot since then to recoup that lost trust and deserve the 30% cut, Proton and the Steam Deck being a massive part of that for many people.
While that seems like a pretty basic feature, I’d wager that they know that people don’t generally buy games in bulk unless they’re free.
Yeah the amount of “No steam no buy” fanboys is absurd. They act like having to open a different program to see their games is like hacking into the matrix. Not to mention that there are already programs like GOG Galaxy that compile all of your games from all your services in to one GUI.
I used to be annoyed about the memory usage of running multiple game launchers but now it’s a bit of a non issue with 32gb ram. I don’t even remember what I had when it was an issue.
Steam is definitely not as bad as you’re making it out to be.
I’ve had a very pleasant experience every time I’ve talked to Steam Support. What’s so bad about them?
I think they forgot how tv works.
I think a much better comparison than Steam would be Spotify.
I use Plex for all my movies and TV shows for the same reasons you mentioned. All my stuff can be in one place instead of having to pay for Netflix, Hulu, Peacock, Disney+, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, and whatever other fucking shit is out there.
Plex also supports music libraries, but I don’t use that feature. Why? Because Spotify has literally 99.9% of all the music I want to listen to, and aside from maybe like Garth Brooks, the other 0.1% is on Youtube. Spotify did it right by just having a basic service that you can pay for and get everything you want. If I had to subscribe to Spotify, Tidal, Napster (Still a thing I guess?), and 4 other services just to access all the music I listen to, I’d go back to piracy.
With Spotify slowly starting to reach a limit in subscribers, it’s unfortunately only a matter of time until they start pulling what Netflix is doing and finding new ways to get money from customers.
Spotify is already making people pay for sound quality that’s akin to a TDK C90
Audiophiles out here in denial of the fact that 99% of music is played via Bluetooth.
I don’t care if my streamed music isn’t the absolute best quality when I’m listening on AirPods or in my car.
What does Bluetooth have to do with it? First there are lossless Bluetooth codecs and even if you don’t use one of them, good source material still helps. Imagine a jpeg that was resaved multiple times to get an idea how artifacts stack.
Spotify’s codec should in theory even be good enough to not be distinguishable from CD quality, but somehow some songs just sound like shit anyway. I suspect it’s a problem with how they were digitised.
I’m using the free version of tidal instead. In the beginning I had a problem with some things not being on there, but that has mostly been resolved.
I’m also just using Sennheiser momentum true wireless 3. No fancy audiophile equipment.
What does Bluetooth have to do with it? First there are lossless Bluetooth codecs and even if you don’t use one of them, good source material still helps. Imagine a jpeg that was resaved multiple times to get an idea how artifacts stack.
Spotify’s codec should in theory even be good enough to not be distinguishable from CD quality, but somehow some songs just sound like shit anyway. I suspect it’s a problem with how they were digitised.
I’m using the free version of tidal instead. In the beginning I had a problem with some things not being on there, but that has mostly been resolved.
I’m also just using Sennheiser momentum true wireless 3. No fancy audiophile equipment.
Then just use Apple Music. Has the same roster of tracks but with better quality overall for free.
Spotify also has a free ad-supported service, which while it does have ads, isn’t as bad as radio, or needs you to go to the effort of pirating the music you want.
I have towed this line for years. Recently Battlefield 2042 was available on steam for a great price so I snapped it up. I’d played it at release via a 1 month trial of EA play and it was absolute trash.
The game is totally fixed! The problem I have, is that I bought it on steam…and it forces me to install and keep myself logged in to the EA app anyway. It fails to launch the game every single time. I have to reboot my computer, manually log out of EA and log back in. It is an absolute shitfight, because EA gargle balls all day.
My point is, I bought the game on steam and I got absolutely duped. I’m all for a bigger library, but not if it means I have to install and use the other crappy apps anyway. Such a disappointment, I won’t be so quick to buy on steam anymore unless they implement a great big flashing red warning that the game is not actually on steam at all.
They do put the warning when a game needs a 3rd party launcher tho?
Not big enough, red enough, or flashing enough. I like steam a lot. I don’t like EA one little bit, or battlenet, or any of those other half-built apps.
Yeah, I get that stuff like that sucks. Funnily enough, I think it’s a little better on Linux because the EA games app is incapable of running on Linux so Proton boots it just long enough to get the game working, and then it fades back into the background. While Linux gaming is still not perfect, that kind of thing is one of the reasons I prefer it over gaming on Windows.
I swore off buying games from companies like EA, and Ubisoft years ago. I’m still bitter about getting duped with Far Cry 3.
Gabe Newall said himself that piracy is never a price problem, but a service problem.
That’s such a simple yet legendary quote… moreso with each passing decade
Go Gaben!
Never have wise words rang more true…
Also stopped pirating games when steam came around. And I stopped pirating shows and movies with the rise of streaming services. Now though, I’m looking into standing up a media server.
I respect that. I’m not setting up a media server because I would expose myself to legal liability, but the people brave enough to actually distribute the content I’m consuming have my full respect.
You still can…
I think Hulu has a decent bundle with Disney, and Paramount with Showtime isn’t bad.
That’s like 4 for 20 bucks. And lots of cell plans come with one free. So it wouldn’t be hard to get a lot of options for 20-40, which is still way cheaper than cable.
Netflix is just starting to get real expensive. If they’d have kept some of their originals from the last couple years I wouldn’t think of canceling, but since they cancel those shows a week after a season drops, I’ll probably drop Netflix soon.
still asking too much, I’ll keep sailing the seas if that’s how much it costs. Plex and jellyfin currently fill this role for free
Everyone’s finances are different.
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i have crappy internet and there’s no way to preload a movie with netflix so the service is useless to me. i have to torrent
That’s unfortunate but understandable.
I think with gaming that is a factor, but personally I think the larger deterrent for pirating games is at least for multiplayer games you can’t really pirate them while still being able to play online most of the time.