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Comment by Cuuugi | Hacker News Reader

I agree with Gabe Newell's stance on piracy.

"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," he said. "If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable."

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/114391-Valves-Gabe...

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This is exactly right. Steam single-handedly revived the entire PC gaming market. A simple to use interface, that has your entire collection / achievements / whatever, that can be accessed from anywhere, without screwing around with keys. That's why it works.

Is there anything that iTunes could learn from Steam?

Yes, by selling full CD quality or higher tracks, and with infamous "Steam Sales". There is no incentive for me to buy a lossy track, when I can just go buy the entire disc cheap online. I know most people don't care about audio quality, but this is a major contention for me.

Did you do a double blind test between an uncompressed CD track and same track in 320 kbps (same master — not vinyl, not "mastered for iTunes)? Did you really hear the difference in statistically significant number of trials?

That's not the point at all. I'm not paying the same or more, for a locked in ecosystem, and lesser quality tracks, regardless if I can perceive the difference.

You can now transfer iTunes purchase into mp3s, right in the iTunes software. As such, I'm not sure if I'd call it a locked ecosystem anymore.

What happens when you want to reencode that 320 to 196 or V0 or want to forego MP3 altogether and go with .ogg? You end up needing to transcode to a lossy source from a lossy source - and quality does suffer from doing that.

There is no reason for a test of perception like this to be blind.

You are not trying to isolate a scientific truth, but engaging a lifetime of biased neural pathways with the goal of maximum enjoyment. When listening to music in the real world, your biases will affect your perception so trying to remove specific ones in the name of science is only muddying your measurement of actual preference.

Support Linux.

I want an iPhone, but I can't even sync music libraries with my Linux desktop.

So I'm stuck with Android.

I haven't synced my iPhone with iTunes in around 3 years. The only cost is iTunes Match (£25 per year) which puts all of my music in the cloud and available to my device.

Probably not worth it. By Valve's measure [0], 0.84% of Steam users are on Linux. They have made the investment into Linux support toward the promotion of their own Linux based hardware. Apple has no such incentive.

Does iTunes not run well enough in Wine [1]?

I say this all as a frequent user of Steam on Linux and a nonuser of iTunes.

[0] - http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

[1] - https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...

They should support Web playback like Google Music. I feel this is a huge issue for me when switching between computers.

Though if someone offered FreeSteam with the exact same interface, convenience, selection, etc. as the official Steam, but the only difference is that everything was free... people would use that instead. It's not just about convenience.

Yeh sure, you know why FreeSteam doesn't exist? Because people don't work for free. The required infrastructure, developers, and legal fees are just insurmountable. What are you going to do, have donations, like...paying for games? Steam is already doing things nearly perfectly, and people don't seem to care.

I think the parent is implying it would be pirated content. Like Popcorn Time for games.

Fully aware of what they were implying. Infrastructure, developers, etc, still needs to exist. Who would be managing that monstrosity of a repository, all of the auto-updating patches, bandwidth, lawyers, and foreign governments to keep the content creators at bay. Never mind the interface to all of it. No one. Steam is far too valuable to even bother ripping off.

I would imagine the same type of people that are maintaining Popcorn Time and the type of people cracking/seeding games currently.

The backend would be bittorrent, so it wouldn't require bandwidth. If all of the contributors would be sufficiently anonymous, lawyers and governments wouldn't matter either.

So it would just be an interface connected to a repository of curated torrents. Not trivial but not nearly as hard as you're making it out to be. I think the only reason it doesn't exist is that videogame pirates are largely content with their current system. That or no one capable of implementing it has had this idea.

Well... there used to be some kind of `FreeSteam`. But keeping it up-to-date was indeed a hassle for both the `maintainers` and `users`. Not worth the time once you get a paycheck or enter college.

I agree with this 100%. Since I started using Steam several years ago I haven't pirated any game. It's actually more of a hassle to torrent a game, unpack it, mount the iso, get it installed, and hope that it runs normally. Steam already has my credit card info saved and within four clicks I can have a game downloading.

And, that's the routine setup. Some games require you to crack it using a separate application. Others require you to disable networking during the install process to make sure it doesn't phone home. Then others disallow multiplayer because it requires logging into the game servers, which authenticate for legit copies. The pirate group reroutes multiplayer servers to a pirate server to play.

And, this was like 5 years ago before I joined Steam. It was a convoluted mess.

Beyond this, a lot of Steam users are familiar with the paradox that Steam is now the opposite of piracy because Steam sales drive so many users to over-buy games just because they're on sale. This drives sales of back catalog releases and provides additional revenue that traditional box software products oftentimes do not capture.

The end result is many Steam users have vast libraries of games that they have either never even installed let alone played for more than 30 minutes. This was common with many of us that used to practice piracy, but now the excess is captured as some revenue rather than none.

My catalog can attest to this, it's brilliant.

I still need to pull my finger out and play Psychonauts again. It's been sitting there for so long.

Haha, I JUST installed that, E3 announcement of Psychonauts 2 got me all worked up.

Hold the goddamn phone. I need to go look at the E3 release list immediately

>so many users to over-buy games just because they're on sale

I have to say that I'm actually kind of okay with this, at least for myself. I choose to view it as voting with my dollars to let indies and publishers know the types of game I'd like to see more of.

And, admit it, it's kind of pleasant to let your eye wander over the list of unplayed games and imagine how much fun they'll be when you someday, somehow find the time to play them (even when you know deep down that you probably never will). "Wanting is better than having" and all that. And the bonus is that they're all virtual and don't clutter up the house.

Value is where one finds it. :)

> voting with my dollars to let indies and publishers know the types of game I'd like to see more of

The "aspirational" purchase, which I'm very familiar with.

"Oh man, that's a great sale price, I should totally pick that up." <my "Up Next" category on steam is only 33 long...>

"has your entire collection / achievements / whatever, that can be accessed from anywhere"

And also taken away from you on a whim. I had this happen for about 3 weeks, without a clear reason and without communication (aside from "we're looking into it"). I will never buy another DRM'd game through Steam or anywhere else.

The chances of that are probably lower than the chances of someone breaking into your house, and stealing the PC containing all of your DRM free games. Every case I've ever read into regarding this, had a lot more to the story than was being led on. Steam isn't going anywhere, the thing is a giant cash cow, and it's in their best interest to keep users active and making purchases.

The beauty of DRM free data is that it can be copied and thus backed up, offsite, which I do. It's more likely that someone will attempt to hack a Steam account and trigger a hold on an account. I did leave out that my money for the 3 games I had bought was refunded while the investigation was pending which may have made it sound less scary, but I wasn't trying to claim anyone was stealing my money. However, the whole reason I signed up for Steam that day was to buy a game that was on sale, even though my computer at the time was not good enough to play it. When I finally got my account back, the game was no longer on sale and they said they couldn't give it to me at the sale price so I ended up paying full price for it, about a $15 difference.

GoG is the next best option, then. Their catalog isn't as deep, but it's expanding all the time. They are also starting to allow you to sync some titles that you've purchased on Steam and download it from them instead, sans DRM/SteamWorks/whatever.

I use them and Humble Bundle sometimes. I'm not a huge gamer but recently I bought SUPERHOT from GoG. In fact, I sought it out after hearing of it years ago and then being reminded of the projects existence when I saw it in a random YouTube video. At the time, their site made it looked like it was only available through Steam and I was going to pass because of it, but luckily I thought to check GoG. You should check out SUPERHOT, it's the most innovative shooter I've played in years.

Its still a pricing problem. I recently wanted to watch the original Star Wars movies and noticed none of them are available for rent. I could only buy them for $20 each. That's a motivator for piracy.

I think piracy is definitely about price as much as access. I think when Gabe speaks, he speaks for Valve and defends its monetization strategies. Of course he's selling you the idea of access, he wants you to put your stuff on Steam, where he gets a 30% cut. Price still matters.

You can't buy the original Star Wars movies for any price. They can only be had by torrent. It's one thing when the rightsholder wants money and you don't want to pay, but when you would gladly pay and they withhold the content, it makes no sense.

I radically disagree.

Most piracy is not a service issue. Most piracy is a greed issue. Yes, there are region locks. Yes, not all content is available to all people. Yes, purchased content may only be usable on certain devices. Yes, we could list edge cases for hours.

But most content is available to most people in a way that has never been easier or faster to access in the history of time. It just costs a little bit of money.

Do you realize how incredibly easy iTunes is? I can purchase and start playing almost any TV show or movie ever made in approximately 5 mouse clicks and 15 seconds. (Yes, if you don't live in the US it may not be available. I covered that already. Thanks.) It's insane how easy it is.

It's impossible to compete with truly free. Netflix can offer a good deal thanks to copyright laws. Were it not for such laws piracy sites would be of such high quality that no paid service could possibly compete.

If you had a credit card with infinite money the paid would be pretty god damned good. Better than piracy. The single biggest advantage piracy has, by far, is it doesn't cost money. That's a pretty damned big advantage.

I think service is a piracy solution. But the problem is greed. Old fashioned, simple greed.

I expect downvotes. But this is my opinion. I hope you don't downvote simply because you disagree.

The downvotes are predictable and not worth commenting on (doing so probably attracts more of them). But, for whatever it's worth, this is pretty close to my position as well.

I think it depends on the product. Newall was 100% correct about video games, which is where steam makes most of its money.

The issue with TV shows is somewhat different because of their episodic nature and the fact that alot of what they have to offer is available for free over the air, or already paid for by the cable customer, or the Netflix customer. It's harder to justify buying something that you really only want to watch once, will likely be available at some point in the future for free, or where the producer just doesn't care enough about your part of the world to even bother releasing it in a reasonable timeframe.

I'm not saying price isn't a factor, or the desire to get tons of "free" stuff isn't a factor, but distribution is still a PITA for TV worldwide, and TV/Movie companies also have the same level of "greed" in terms of wanting to herd consumers towards DVD/Blueray that Record companies have with regards to CD sales and wanting to return to the huge paydays of the 90s.

Of course free is always more valuable. It's not a stance, it's a fact.

Let's not conflate the delivery service used to get the product from the actual product.

No, it is not. You confuse value with price, totally different things. "Es de necios confundir valor y precio"Machado "It is proper of foolish people to confuse price and value"

You download something on the internet, for free, it could contain anything. The spy agencies of UK and USA had used modified pirated software in order to access computers of enterprise CEOs and engineers that were so stupid to compromise secrets valued on millions in order to save a few bucks.

Is that true anymore? I have probably a dozen different ways to get the latest albums instantly: Amazon, iTunes, Spotify, etc.

Selections aren't entirely universal, which I think hurts a lot. I subscribe to Spotify and it's mostly great, but sometimes it just doesn't have something for no discernible reason. Usually I'm discovering music in the app so I never even notice, but every so often I want to listen to something specific and it's just not there. YouTube becomes my backup for that.

And specifically for "latest albums," they seem to do a delayed release a lot. I saw this recently with Clapton's I Still Do, but it shows up with many others too. Often they'll release a single track for streaming, and have a link to purchase the whole thing. And even now that they've made the album available for streaming, there's one track missing!

It's a bit frustrating to pay a subscription only to have it show me an advertisement to buy an album they refuse to stream. I'm less familiar with other services but it sounds like they're similar.

One trouble with the Steam analogy is that there's nothing for games like YouTube is for music. I can go from zero to listening to a particular piece of music in barely more time than it takes to type the name of the song. Pirating games takes a lot more work.

It certainly is for anyone outside of the US:

http://imgur.com/a/A8ut2

Steam does have region-locked keys though. And some games don't have a purchase button from my region.

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