this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2024
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Yep. DRM has been and continues to be a complete waste of everyone's time that only makes things worse for paying customers. Pirates get the best experience and then companies wonder why they struggle to get people to pay for inferior experiences. Gabe Newell hit the nail on the head over a decade ago when he said:
Instead companies keep doing the exact opposite, and surprise piracy isn't impacted at all.
Gabe Newell really nailed it there. I buy tons of games on Steam. I also used to subscribe to Netflix and rent movies from Google. But now Netflix has junk and I need to subscribe to 10 services and they occasionally deleted my partner's downloaded shows while traveling because they couldn't validate the license. I can't even play HD videos from any legal retailer on any of my devices other than a Chromecast as they aren't under the media lobby's control.
But say I was to download a movie from a torrent site. It would probably be a higher quality than streaming services would give me, I can play it offline with no concerns about license expiry and it will still be 4k on every device I choose to watch on. I could also take a screenshot and share to my friend (which may cause them to purchase that content!). It's basically all upsides. Maybe slightly more difficult to find the content than something like Google Play rentals, but really not much and the tradeoff is the greater choice of content available.
It is reductive to say that piracy is just a service problem. There are lots of people who will try to save the money. But a lot of those people wouldn't spend much if any money either way. They would just skip most content, or watch with friends or similar. There is a huge group of people (myself included) that would happily pay a significant amount for content if they provided a good experience. But they are too busy failing to stop piracy to bother giving a good experience.
Yeah I mean you've basically got three district groups at play.
The first group, either have no money or no interest in your goods or services. They might turn to piracy if it's available, but even if it isn't they're still not buying anything from you. DRM is pointless to this group because it's not stopping anything.
The second group are the marginal cases. They potentially have the money to buy your products, but maybe they're pinching pennies or they aren't convinced your products are worth the price you're asking for them. A lot of pirates of Adobe PhotoShop a couple decades back would have fallen into this group. DRM might be effective on this group, but there's a strong argument to be made that it's going to cost you just as many sales as it earns you, and ultimately doesn't actually stop piracy, merely delays it a bit. You'd likely see as many or more sales from this group if you removed the DRM and added more features or cut your prices
The last group are your paying customers. They're already happily (or at least grudgingly) giving you money. The only thing DRM is doing for this group is making their experience worse and likely pushing them towards that second group.
There's basically no group where DRM is really improving things. At best you're breaking even, at worst it's costing you sales, to say nothing of the development costs of implementing the DRM in the first place.
The best part is DRM really doesn't lead to any sales of video content, because everything there's even a shred of demand for is still ripped right away anyways.
Because it's a video. Even if you could keep the encoded version from being ripped (which you pretty clearly can't do), at the end of the day it's raw pixels and audio.
Last year I could cast episodes of DS9 I get from Paramount+ through Amazon Prime to my parents’ TV. This year I can’t, likely as an anti-piracy measure. So I hooked my device up via HDMI. Still couldn’t watch it on the TV. You know what? I’m gonna go complain to them before I stop subscribing.
You've summed this up very well! I was a group one pirate in my youth. Then I got a job and a girlfriend who liked cable TV. Then my brother and I traded off paying for Netflix. Life was good. I was happily in camp 3. Then we cut the cord and I was even happier with what I was paying for my media experience! Then it all went to shit.
I feel like I blinked and everyone had their hand in my pocket for $10 - $20 per month, and there was still nothing I wanted to watch. So I dusted off the black flag and am once again very happy with my media experience.
They pushed me back to group 2. I'm paying for my content, and I feel like I'm paying a fair price. My money just isn't going to the media conglomerates who ruined everything. I built my own set top box / dvr out of a sbc. I couldn't be happier.
Exactly. Now just to watch something, I first have to figure out on which app it is. Then I have to check if I have a subscription for that app, maybe as part of the parents cable bundle, maybe it comes with prime but with ads. Oh that show was sold to another streaming service.
Then you launch it and you have the opening jingles and ads. Then the menu takes forever to load. Then you find your show. It crashes because most TVs come with decade old hardware running Android TV at 4K. You try again. You hit pause to go pee, you come back the TV went to standby and closed the app so you start all over again.
My media collection? 10 seconds and it's streaming off my NAS over SMB. It's literally easier, faster and better to pirate the content. By the time we're done logging into 5 different apps the show finished downloading on the PC. By the time you're done you're wondering if you still want to even watch the show, and it's in glorious 720p as you learn you have the base plan only.
Yep, I used to pay for Netflix, now I just stream off a jellyfin server.
I’m working on implementing that as well.
And here I am not knowing the last time I pirated a game. It's been over a decade probably
Meanwhile, I'm probably going to pirate Xenoblade Chronicals X as it's only available on the Wii U and fuck buying/renting one to deal with 1 game.
Anymore, I only pirate as a demo service for games that I don't think are going to be worth the spend (Starfield is a prime example). That being said, the majority of games I've pirated over the last decade were purchased once I knew the game was enjoyable. But fuck dropping $70 on any game without a demo or pre-release reviews in full
So far I've been okay with steams 2 hour return window and only had to return a few games over the years.
I had a big fight with blizzard over Diablo 4 where I messed up the accounts I wanted to install the game on so I could play with my partner at home, and troubleshooting the issue to even figure out how I'd fucked up took an hour or something with a few minutes of in game time figuring it out and they refused to refund it so I could buy it again on the right account.
Took a couple weeks of back and forth but they finally refunded so I could repurchase.
I pirated a game yesterday. That game was a console game for a console that hasn't been sold in 20+ years. I don't feel bad about it.
If the publisher had wrapped it in an emulator and stuck it on steam for $5 I'd probably have just bought it.
If Nintendo did that you'd know they'd still charge the same full price for a Nintendo title.
They are doing that, except that you need to pay for a subsceiption to play those games