"The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It's by giving those people a service that's better than what they're receiving from the pirates." - Gaben
This is why we can't have nice things. Because people feel entitled to others people's work.
Pirates pirate because of bad UX, which Netflix solved for them and others copied, which the entire industry now seems hell bent on breaking again. And they think their size and the DMCA and the learning curve to pirating nowadays can prevent it from happening, so sure, let's abuse our customers now that we think they can do nothing about it. But this will fail. If it is easier to learn how to use torrents and mega and whatever else than it is to navigate the plethora of services to find what you want (at the current rate we will need TV Guide again soon) and call your girlfriend at work to get the 2fa code they just sent to her phone, people will do it.
It's a nice soundbite, but even he doesn't believe it.
Gaben's quote on piracy was about 2 1/2 years after the big Spore DRM debacle [0], which affected legitimate customers. I've been using Steam for who knows how long and have never had the DRM be an issue, even after several computer upgrades and motherboard replacements. I just have to log in and I can redownload all my games with no issue at all.
Yes, Steam is DRM, but it's sane DRM.
> has a variety of mechanisms to prevent account sharing yeah?
Well...yeah. You aren't supposed to share accounts.
> It's a nice soundbite, but even he doesn't believe it.
It's not just about DRM. When he talks about it being a "service problem", it's not just about the ability to simply play games. When you buy from Steam, you get automatic updates, cloud saves, community integration (such as the Workshop for installing mods and other user-made content), built-in screenshot management features, and more. If you pirate the game, you get none of that.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spore_(2008_video_game)#DRM_co...