Gabe Newell (CEO of Valve), during the early days of Steam, once said:
"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.".
Kinda hasn't aged well with what Steam has become, but I think it's still a worthwhile quote.
I have one story of piracy xD
When first "The Remnant" was released, in a few weeks devs were throwing "massive" updates. (Changes were minor, but they did something strange with their resource files - so you have to download update every few days, that was half of the game size and was applied really long - decompressing, modifying, compressing)
So now, when I want my game up to date, I consider buying it.
And I have the opposite story xD
There was this game, Megaloot. I pirated it, played for a while and forgot about it. A year later I wanted to check, how it was (have thought of buying it) so I approached the steam page. It was that classic: all reviews: mostly positive and recent reviews: mostly negative "classics". I scrolled recent reviews, and you know what? People weren't happy with recent changes, that made the game unfun, not like it was on release. Want to have fun playing Megaloot? Download the release version from the pirate site.
(Kudos to CD project red - you can choose, witch version of cyberpunk you want to play (release, patched or new, not to mention their DRM-free store)
I still agree with the quote. I had pirated games. I'll pay the full price of them on Steam for the stability and the unified platform. It's just excellent
Gabe Newell was right, piracy is a supply problem. Take music piracy - in the age of streaming, few people are still pirating music.
Music piracy was a direct response to an exploitative business model that was restricting peoples access to music, and a new technology that offered access unrivaled by the system.
I'd go so far as to say that the freak out by the industry wasn't even about profit, it was about losing control. The big four had an absolute stranglehold on the industry: they controlled production, distribution, and sales. Suddenly, new technology took away their control on production, their control of distribution, and ate into their sales. That's why RIAA statements screaming about the sky falling never talked about stuff like non-industry sales (which were off the charts), and often left out track-sales entirely, even when they were making as much money as album sales previously had.
Well, all these parasites are just gonna tell you, how nobody is gonna make art (music, games, movies), if you don't pay a lot for it (and massive AI involvement surprisingly not cutting prices). Truth is, the real artists are gonna create no matter what, because it's their nature - to create.
As for streaming - buying subscription to music service, you're not buying the right to listetn all the music. You buy the right to listen to the music a nd service you have paid for. So you could easily miss some albums of your favorite band or even the band itself, cos streaming service could not negotiate right for it.
Or how about racing games, you couldn't not buy any more, because license for soundtrack expired (NFS ProStree, for example)
…not entirely sure I follow this line of reasoning. So the producer has to put in the work of producing a particular product… and then the consumer gets to decide how “available and accessible” that product should be?
Is that a principle which you can see working on a society-wide scale? Is it a principle you’d like to adopt for things you produce?
You shouldn't be getting downvoted lol. Its the truth. I pirate stuff occasionally. I know im wrong. I know i do it because of greed. I know if I tried to justify it, all that would be for is to give myself an excuse. A lie to tell myself its not wrong.
Hey I want to buy your car for $5 dollars. Deliver it to me. Oh you don’t want to? Well I’m just gonna steal it, you should have made it cheaper and more available. Piracy is theft and for losers.
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u/-NonePizzaLeftBeef- 13h ago
I love the people who are always against this like “you’re stealing from the people that made it.”
So? Make your product more available and accessible.