> "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. 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."
I can also return it if I end up not lilinkg it, not like with a physical copy.
MTX and Always-Online BS is also down to the individual games, nothing Steam can do about it realistically.
They had original steam drm that people railed against at the begining.
Valve and Gabe are not the second coming people make them to be. They are the least shitty maybe, but man... the bar is really low at this stage.
Then i'd bet if they gave the publisher statistics on how many people never see their game because it contains denuvo or a 3rd party launcher you'd see meanigful change, and if not then at least the store is nicer for the steam customers who care about it.
Disney plus doesn't allow casting to my pc to my tv with desktop mirroring. This is DRM crap. I was using that to watch the same movie my children were watching while I was doing some work and I couldn't.
(Even better, there are games that I wouldn't buy on Steam, had I not have prior experience with them.)
I still pay for stuff on Bandcamp, but that's not because it's easier but because I want to support the artists I enjoy more directly.
For whatever reason, the ability to arrange music licensing to allow for an aggregator of everything is much easier than for movie and TV show licensing.
If I pay £15 a month and listen to 15 different artists 50 times each I would expect each artist to get £1 minus costs, so say 50p.
But they don’t, they instead get a fraction of that.
I like Spotify and use it a lot, but I think their UI is somewhat okay at best.
Less convenient in the AI/recommendation sense, for me Spoty was the best. I use yt music to save some bucks but spoti was superior
I have a deal with myself, that I'm a few months behind on actually, to spend at least $10 a month (the equivalent of my old Google music sub) on Bandcamp - and on primarily Australian music, to support local in my minimal way.
When I was younger I’d always have music playing in the background but now I only listen to music intentionally – mostly when I’m walking in town or on public transport. I usually download a select number of albums in advance and listen to complete albums at a time – just as I did with other media. Ideally, my monthly Spotify spend would be divided among the few artists that I actually listen to. Instead, the (small) share of revenue that the artist gets is their fractional share of what everyone else is listening to (most likely as background† music, selected by a Spotify algorithm or playlist), i.e., it’s not proportional to the amount of times that I listen to the artist.
† I’d often hear good music being played in a small (usually independent, not a chain) store or café where the workers have some control over what they’re listening to in their work-place. In the past, I used to discover new music and have some good conversations by asking staff in a shop what is the music they’re playing on the sound system. For the past few years, that hasn’t worked so well: the staff stare blankly, are surprised at the question and/or show no interest in what’s being fed to them by Spotify.
Spotify takes the blame, but the record labels take the lion's share.
There’s no such thing as casual music discovery though with piracy. It’s a bit like visiting the largest record store ever built. You’ve gotta thumb through the albums and talk to the other nerds.
I have no idea why they would not offer it in 4k, it's not a licensing issue since both ST:SNW and SkyShowtime are owned by Paramount. It's mind boggling why they would sabotage their own service like that.
> why they would not offer it in 4k
That’s because the other license was either too pricey, or simply unavailable (another platform might have purchased exclusivity for that show in 4k in your area)
Currently only piracy provides this service, and paid content services are choosing legislation over competition.
The established players really should be working on this, because it's only a matter of time before some pirate service turns legit and eats all their lunches.
F1, sure I'll pay for great service every weekend and historical race replays.
NBA, no way am I paying more to get some of the games I want to watch most blacked out (not to mention the insane amount of ads).
I disagreed at the time. And I still think that's too blunt a statement for the population as a whole. But the popularity of streaming music services in particular does suggest there's definitely a lot of truth to it for many people at the right price point.
When you are an adult you have more money then time. Naturally attracted to just buy it as its the easiest.
You might never be able to root out piracy amongst the young people and if you do they will not pay since they cannot afford it. But doing so will make your service less convenient for everyone. So you gained no extra profit but made service worse for everyone else.
But now adults who would be happy to pay are inconvenienced by all the shit you throw at them, to the point they might go back to piracy as more convenient option.
I used to buy loads of legit content. VHS macrovision degraded quality for "anti-piracy purposes". Basically it flashed contrast and automatic gain would fuck up.
Then it was DVD. This was probably the best format cause it was easy to rip. Again, ripping is illegal cause DMCA (Note: breaking DMCA is worse a crime than copyright infringement). Its yet another case where property rights are superseded by some bullshit intellectual right. These media fucks couldnt be happy to just sell content... they wanted to sell it again and again and again.
Then HD-DVD came out for a short while. Supported by MS and Xbox. I didnt buy it, and the format died. No big loss since everything that Im aware of was also published on Bluray.
And Bluray. It's a cracked format. Discs and players demand internet connection. Bunch of anti-purchaser crap. There's rippers for this stuff too.
And now, it's streaming streaming streaming. You never get any discs, and you never retain ownership of any shows. There is no more "loan buddy the DVD". You now have to provide the login, which is of course linked to your CC number. And because of "streaming", when you leave, you take nothing with you.
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Whereas piracy, I download it once, and I have it. It'll work on any device. I can back it up. I can put it on a media server. I can copy it to a friend (sharing is caring, right?). Nothing is fighting me tooth and nail each step.
So, even if I have enough money for as much music and videos as I want, why in the hell would I pay piles-o-money for garbage service, garbage quality media, abusive handling of customer, and little to nothing to show for money paid?
Nah, I'll stick with piracy. I get treated better in that avenue all around.