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Comment by kjellsbells | Hacker News Reader

2008 to 2025 is an eternity in software.

Webapps, and the generation of people who built them (who very likely grew up in the era of desktop apps with activation keys), killed the conversation off. You share your identity with the webapp provider to get access to all but the simplest apps, and there's a tiered access model going from freemium to premium. In particular, freemium attempts to remove that "I just need it for one quick thing" friction.

That said, the reasons for piracy remain the same: friction and price. It goes both ways really. People pay for 365 because free Office suites dont quite do what they want and that introduces friction. People pirate Photoshop because its outrageously expensive relative to the value that it provides to the pirating user.

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Seconding your ending statement there: I make good money, and I pay for a lot of software to make my little life spin along, and the little bit of theoretical piracy I consider doing, satirically of course, is far more to do with how onerous the procedure is to acquire the product legally than anything about it's costs.

Movies are a great example. If I can stream a given movie on any of the services I already purchase, obviously that's great and I'll do that. Failing that, I'd like to buy it on iTunes as I trust Apple a little more than most others in the space (YMMV). Failing that, if I can buy temporary access on Amazon Prime/YouTube/Whatever, sure. If however I'm essentially expected to fork out yet another $10-$20 on yet another subscription with yet another mediocre app that will slow my Apple TVs to a crawl, or worse, demand the right to shove ads in my face... no. Pass.

I also ditched Photoshop's $10/mo subscription after years because the quality of it just kept going down. I remember being so excited when the first update for the M1 Macs dropped, and Photoshop suddenly felt to use like it did in the 2010's; snappy, performant, efficient. And it took barely 3 years for Adobe to manage to bloat it up so it ran like shit again. So I dropped that and spent $50 on Affinity Photo and I couldn't be happier. Granted some things take a few more steps to do in Affinity, but those steps are all quick, snappy and responsive unlike seemingly every action in Photoshop.

It blows my mind how the software and larger entertainment industries refuse to learn the lessons of Steam. Steam isn't perfect, of course, it has it's issues here and there but it made great strides to reduce piracy not by locking the products down so hard and with such onerous software/rootkits/DRM but instead by just making the idea of buying and getting the game so obtusely convenient that pirating it is more work and why spend hours downloading questionable software and carefully going through an installation procedure when you could just wishlist it there, wait for it to go on sale, grab it for $10 and have it in the time it takes you to make a coffee?

> It blows my mind how the software and larger entertainment industries refuse to learn the lessons of Steam

IMO it’s because so many people in large companies want to avoid ownership and responsibility.

It’s like that old saying “nobody got fired for contracting IBM.”

Nobody gets fired for going with intrusive DRM. It’s good for the company!

My understanding of Valve is that it’s a small-ish high-ownership company.

Software has this (very convenient) problem of only selling tool chests, not just tools.

So if you just need one or two features of a program, then you still need to purchase...err, rent...the entire thing. Sometimes you even need to rent it for a full year.

Thankfully it seems LLM's are on track to solve this problem at least partially by being able to effectively code very narrow scope solutions. You can't prompt Claude to write Photoshop, but you can prompt it to write a program that scales images and applies a basic filter. (Yes, I know there are a gazillion free photo tools, this is just an accessible example).

> It blows my mind how the software and larger entertainment industries refuse to learn the lessons of Steam.

Apple includes a lot of free software with their paid devices, such as iWork, Mail, Garageband, etc.

Not sure but would say that people pirate Photoshop even more since it went full subscription model. From my experience, once I learned they're going this way I bought the last Lightroom available and have it on my DVD. Of course this has been quite a time ago and it will not work with new cameras' raw formats but I guess I will just buy older camera, not the bleeding edge one, if my camera breaks beyond repeair

My use case is: do some photos once every two months and make them better using lightroom. Paying monthly for it makes really no sense for me.

> People pirate Photoshop because its outrageously expensive relative to the value that it provides to the pirating user

Why would this be the case? Surely it's because pirating it is cheaper and there aren't any enforced consequences.

One time payment for affinity photo/designer and couldn't be happier not to deal with Adobe's subpar software and all that comes with it.

That sounds good (it's what I'd do) but doesn't seem to be related to what I'm commenting on.

I like Affinity Photo a lot, and it's what I use, but Photoshop is definitely the more powerful program. Affinity still doesn't even have an auto-select.

I've tried Affinity. Unfortunately a literal lifetime of photoshop has made it basically impossible to switch. It's like getting into a car and all the buttons are rearranged and behave different.

The jokes on me. I pirated photoshop way back in the day. Now I have no choice but to shell out a subscription.

Piracy is one of the reasons SaaS has much weaker adoption in South East Asia.

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