this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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i remember when valve's steam completely killed nearly all video game piracy just by existing
There was a golden age of Netflix where I basically stopped pirating movies and TV too.
Now streaming is a fragmented ad-ridden nightmare and I pirate more than ever before. It's not like it's free either, I pay for a VPN, disk storage, let alone the time and maintenance.
If I could buy (and actually own) high quality digital copies of movies/tv with no bullshit at a reasonable price that would be a serious value proposition that would beat out the hassles that come along with piracy.
Fully agree. Why is renting a movie the same cost as a month of some random subscription service? Then you also get a copy you can only watch for like 24 hours. If you "buy" you still dont get access to the file, just some digital copy that can be taken away at any point.
I mean I always knew digital renting was kind of a lame idea, but I didn't put together how monumentally bad it is until you said that...
Imagine if steam sold movies and TV shows
They did that 10 years ago. Right around the time they added the video stuff. Didn't work out. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/steam-stepping-back-from-selling-films
Around 50 are still available if you know how to look for them: https://store.steampowered.com/search/?sort_by=Released_DESC&category1=992
Watch Kung Fury if you want to test it. I loved the cheese: https://store.steampowered.com/app/374570/Kung_Fury/
I don't think Steam's business model works well for Movies/TV. Besides delivering the game files after your initial purchase Steam also continues to host and deliver update files for games over time, as well as lots of extras like syncing game saves, the workshop for mods, etc. I like having a centralized service that offers these features and acts a launcher for games because it's very convenient. These features are a huge value add that makes the service very attractive over piracy.
But for Movies/TV the main thing I want is the ability to watch the content, at a high quality, on whatever device I want, whenever I want to watch it. Theoretically this shouldn't be to hard, but with the way all the rights work it's effectively impossible for any streaming service to offer this. Content gets removed all the time, it's spread across a ton of different services that all offer a different experience. In a vain attempt to thwart pirates it's a pain in the ass to watch content offline so it's unreliable at best.
The only way to get the experience I want with Movies/TV is to pirate the content.
And Spotify pretty much killed music piracy . Although you could argue they just changed who did the robbing
I think people still pirate music by downloading them off of youtube
To the point where a lot of gamers have paid for more games than they'd ever have time to play.
Hey... I only have 600 Steam Games and i don't remember half of them... But don't worry, I will play them, after Dragons Dogma 2 and the Elden Ring DLC of course.
After I'm finished doing the same shit over and over again for another 7-800 hours in warframe I'm sure I'll get around to playing some of the games I actually paid money for.
This is the truth man, I will even buy games on Steam that I've pirated in the past with no intention of playing them again. We all largely stopped pirating movies and TV for almost a decade when the streaming experience was superior.
If there was a steam like service for movies and tv and music that worked on all my platforms I would pay for it just like I paid for a home server running the *arrs.