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> 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

> 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. Gabe Newell And it's true. Pirating games has never been as unattractive as it has been today due to Steam's monopoly and ubiquity. TV and Movies on the other hand are getting worse every year, with Netflix focusing on their originals and everybody else doing their own streaming services.

yvdriess 8y ago
Epic game store is paying a lot for exclusives to compete with steam. We should see a jump in games piracy.
- dleslie 8y ago
  Absolutely. Every major game forum I read appears to have an abundance of such sentiment. Timed exclusives on a store that many people outright _hate_ is going to increase piracy, without a doubt.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - TheGRS 8y ago
    I really don't understand the sentiment since having 2-3 game launchers has been the norm for digital games for years now. I can't buy any new Blizzard/Activision games or EA games through Steam that I know of, and these are some of the largest game companies and largest releases in the world.
    - dleslie 8y ago
      Blizzard and Origin are reasonably good stores and launchers, and their exclusives are that of the publisher who runs the store. Epic Store is... Not a quality experience and its exclusives are not solely from the publisher that runs the store.
      - Cyph0n 8y ago
        Origin was also “not a quality experience” when it first came out, and it was also universally hated by fans of Steam. So why do you think Epic can’t do the same thing?
        dleslie 8y ago
        Epic isn't doing the same thing. Origin's exclusives were EA games. Epic's exclusives are not all Epic games.
        gruez 8y ago
        Does that make a difference? The end result is the same. Games that that you want to play are locked behind a particular launcher.
        dleslie 8y ago
        Of course it makes a difference. Epic isn't attempting to make their store succeed on its own merits, or on the merit of their own games; they are buying exclusivity in order to succeed. That upsets people, and rightly so. Epic is using their cash to complete, and are trying to replace something people love with something worse.
        Cyph0n 8y ago
        > Epic is using their cash to complete, and are trying to replace something people love with something worse. But this is the point: the fact that Epic is making "something worse" might be true now, but will change in the future. This is precisely what happened with Origin for example, at least in the perception of gamers.
  - kyriakos 8y ago
    This is not the same as Netflix and competitors. No one is stopping a steam user from buying from epic store since its an one off purchase , but to watch an amazon exclusive you need an additional subscription.
    - dleslie 8y ago
      Except that the store itself is a deterrent, for a whole laundry list of reasons you can seek elsewhere. For me, the deal breakers are: 1. No user reviews. 2. Refund system is allegedly horrible and unreliable. 3. No cloud saves. 4. No mod workshop. 5. No forums. 6. No store-provided, NAT-punching, low latency networking. The last three have made for many of my best gaming experiences in recent years
      - mises 8y ago
        For me, one issue is the forty-something percent stake tencent has. Both in that I don't trust their software and that I have serious ethical concerns about directly supporting china. I know it's essentially impossible to not buy anything from them, but I would say videogames are definitely something people can easily stop buying.
      - cortesoft 8y ago
        You also can't buy a game for a friend.
      - kyriakos 8y ago
        That's just a matter of competition catching up though. From a consumer perspective multiple stores should have a positive effect. On the other hand streaming services are not benefiting the consumer directly.
        dleslie 8y ago
        Those things cost money. It's where a good chunk of Valve's cut goes.
      - Joakal 8y ago
- krispbyte 8y ago
  Game piracy still exists. There's subreddits dedicated to tracking when DRM schemes are broken. Also piracy of region locked and old, difficult to buy now, console games has never disappeared. The games that are out of this are those that need online accounts to play.
- rgoulter 8y ago
  FWIW, in terms of exclusivity, there have been games exclusive to EA's Origin. (e.g. the 2017 Battlefront II). I'm not sure how significant "any added friction increases piracy" is in terms of numbers.
  - dleslie 8y ago
    The difference is that people don't really hate exclusives on the publisher's own store unless the store is awful. IMHO: GFWL: awful and hated, dead now UPlay: awful and hated Steam: best in class and loved GoG: second best in class and accepted Origin: good and tolerated Blizzard: good and tolerated Epic: awful and hated
    - TheGRS 8y ago
      People hated Origin pretty bad, but EA stuck to their guns. IMO its a pretty awful experience. And to be honest Steam isn't exactly a great experience either. I noticed they're finally doing a face lift on their storefront soon, perhaps from the competition?
      - dleslie 8y ago
        At least Origin didn't vacuum up exclusives from non-EA publishers. People who hated Origin probably already hated EA, too. The Steam library update had been years in the making.
    - indigochill 8y ago
      I'd personally put GoG ahead of Steam, and not just for "grr Steam" reasons. Steam has a habit of breaking in weird ways like telling me I can't view my own achievements because my profile is private or suddenly wanting to download 0 bytes for half the games in my library. GoG on the other hand has been totally rock-solid for me.
      - dleslie 8y ago
        I prefer GoG, as well. I was attempting to express my understanding of the generally sentiment that I see from gamers I have a cron job that backs up my library every two weeks via lgogdownloader
- sebazzz 8y ago
  Difference is that it doesn't cost you anything to use Steam, Epic game store, or Origin. You buy the game, you have the game. You can install 5 game stores on your computer and that's it. For movies or TV series you need to have a subscription. That is the thing that costs money, even if you don't use it. People don't want to have 3 or 4 subscriptions, so that is why they pirate. This is not a problem I see happening for games.
  - errantspark 8y ago
    It's still annoying to deal with any distribution platform that isn't Steam. I understand why things are this way, but it doesn't make it any better from my point of view. I hate having to add my friends on another platform to play Ape Legs or the new Unreal. I don't want to deal with another login, another stupid launcher that wants to be on all the time with incessant updates. I'm not going to end up pirating games because I mostly play F2P hat simulators, and the singleplayer games I care about are all available on GoG. It still all feels quite user-hostile. I can't think of a solution though.
    - meditate 8y ago
      The solution is to support single-sign-on and to allow data importing/export. These are solved problems, but companies don't receive enough pressure to do them because they are more interested in building moats.
omg_ketchup 8y ago
I really don't understand why everyone doesn't just offer all the movies all the time. These availability windows on shit is ridiculous. You wonder how pirates stay in business, it's because of availability windows and that region-locked bullshit. The Wolf of Wall Street came out like 10 years ago, and you're telling me the only way to watch it is to buy it for $15 on Amazon? Keep dreaming.
- markbnj 8y ago
  > I really don't understand why everyone doesn't just offer all the movies all the time. I don't have an expert answer, but I'll bet the answer has "copyright holders" in it somewhere.
  - omg_ketchup 8y ago
    Sure, but why wouldn't they get paid based on streams of their copyrighted materials, or some other payment scheme? I mean, hey, it was good enough for video stores in the 90's, right? The equivalent of* Wolf of Wall Street sat on the shelf in Blockbuster for 15 years after it came out. They didn't have to hide it in the back because of an availability window.
    - secabeen 8y ago
      Well, part of that is that the price went down. When video stores were in their heyday, they often paid 5-6 times more for each tape in order to have public playback rights. The studios realized that they would make more money selling copies to individuals, but after that changed, the big rental chains changed to models where they paid the studios per-rental.
      - infogulch 8y ago
        You don't need any special rights to rent out physical copies of movies. Video stores, Netflix, Redbox all could just buy disks and tapes from the local market and rent them out directly. Sure, they can make a business deal to get better pricing and cut out the middleman, but this effectively puts a cap on that negotiation because the local market is always a fallback. When streaming deals fail there is no fallback, see Netflix's depleting catalog. The problem is that the experience of watching a movie at home only shifted a little bit during the transition from physical to streaming, while the legal and licensing framework between the two are so different they are hardly comparable. Copyright holders took great advantage of the change to a new format allowing them to redefine the meaning of licensing so that they have more control and can extract more value.
GuiA 8y ago
Ironically, an increasing number of parties has been having dollar signs in their eyes as of late, trying to get some of Steam's pie. It's entirely possible that this fate will befall the PC gaming industry at some point.
Razengan 8y ago
Without piracy, many third-world populations may have never been able to really use computers until about 2005-2010.
- eikenberry 8y ago
  You're off by 10-15 years as free software operating systems have been usable since at least the mid 90s. But there was a period before that which what you say was true which was one of the big reasons behind the GNU project.
agumonkey 8y ago
A subset of piracy, when I was a kid for instance, was not about service but clearly a pricing "problem" (the problem being: I was a kid)
amelius 8y ago
> TV and Movies on the other hand are getting worse every year, with Netflix focusing on their originals and everybody else doing their own streaming services. We seem to be at an all-time low of #Bittorrent seeders though.
- mruts 8y ago
  It’s unfortunate, even on private sites there aren’t as many seeders as they used to be. I have a hard time finding well seeded content from 90s, 80s, and 70s. 10 years ago, things were so much better.
meditate 8y ago
>Pirating games has never been as unattractive as it has been today due to Steam's monopoly and ubiquity. This is a cop out to me. I have never been a fan of DRM for this reason, because it requires an unassailable monopoly for customers not to notice that it's a problem. I am probably in the minority because I've never been happy with Steam's service because of this, but as long as they are the 800 pound gorilla in the room then they obviously never will listen to any of my complaints. If you take this line of thinking to movies, it leads to dangerous ideas like "everyone but my favorite streaming service should just close down" which is totally ridiculous, but still when I talk to friends about this issue they are quick to propose that as the solution! It really makes me try to avoid contact with the digital publishing industry as much as possible. What we see now is the movie studios' response to that which is: - To increase the size of the data dramatically (4K+ video) so that casual sharing requires hardware investment and thus remains difficult - To make things highly dependent on a very specialized backend to work correctly (Netflix's recent experiment with branching narratives) - To start bundling it with other things (Amazon Prime) - To offer streaming analytics as a better data platform than the traditional Nielsen ratings - And probably more I can't think of right now The thing is that these are all real value adds which I am glad to see them competing on. Right now all the downstream vendors are forced to invest in rolling their own DRM. I would rather see copyright holders offering a system where a proof of purchase can be transferred between services, but they would need to band together to actually do it and start putting that into their contracts. Can you imagine if we had that instead of DRM?
- petetnt 8y ago
  Steam is not DRM though and they offer lots of DRM free games too[0] https://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_Big_List_of_DRM-Free_Games_on_Steam https://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_Big_List_of_DRM-Free_Games...
  - meditate 8y ago
    The issue I have is not that the vendor (Steam, Netflix, etc) is imposing DRM, but that the copyright holders demand it, and that there are cases where the vendor gives into these demands. You're right that Steam doesn't do this in all cases, but in some they do.
ohithereyou 8y ago
>Pirating games has never been as unattractive as it has been today due to Steam's monopoly and ubiquity. Hang around reddit's /r/crackwatch for some time and tell me how unattractive games piracy is.
gruez 8y ago
>> We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem [...] >And it's true Maybe I'm the exception, but given the choice of shelling out $60 (works out to just over 4 hours of work at median US pay), or waiting a few hours/days/weeks (depending on DRM strength) and getting it for free, I'm picking the latter every time. edit: changed average pay to median
- ihattendorf 8y ago
  If you can afford it, please pay for it. I get that not everyone can afford $60 games, but if you would have actually purchased it if pirating wasn't an option, please support the game.
screye 8y ago
We are seeing this happen as you speak. With game developers going back to proprietary launchers and platform exclusives, piracy of such games is rising again. I predict the new Metro and Borderlands games will be heavily pirated. When the epic launcher lacks more than half of the essential features of Steam, people will boycott your platform for forcing them to use it.
karmakaze 8y ago
The Steam thing makes sense. However I don't see how Netflix Originals is different than Steam.

yvdriess 8y ago

Epic game store is paying a lot for exclusives to compete with steam. We should see a jump in games piracy.

dleslie 8y ago
Absolutely. Every major game forum I read appears to have an abundance of such sentiment. Timed exclusives on a store that many people outright _hate_ is going to increase piracy, without a doubt.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- TheGRS 8y ago
  I really don't understand the sentiment since having 2-3 game launchers has been the norm for digital games for years now. I can't buy any new Blizzard/Activision games or EA games through Steam that I know of, and these are some of the largest game companies and largest releases in the world.
  - dleslie 8y ago
    Blizzard and Origin are reasonably good stores and launchers, and their exclusives are that of the publisher who runs the store. Epic Store is... Not a quality experience and its exclusives are not solely from the publisher that runs the store.
    - Cyph0n 8y ago
      Origin was also “not a quality experience” when it first came out, and it was also universally hated by fans of Steam. So why do you think Epic can’t do the same thing?
      - dleslie 8y ago
        Epic isn't doing the same thing. Origin's exclusives were EA games. Epic's exclusives are not all Epic games.
        gruez 8y ago
        Does that make a difference? The end result is the same. Games that that you want to play are locked behind a particular launcher.
        dleslie 8y ago
        Of course it makes a difference. Epic isn't attempting to make their store succeed on its own merits, or on the merit of their own games; they are buying exclusivity in order to succeed. That upsets people, and rightly so. Epic is using their cash to complete, and are trying to replace something people love with something worse.
        Cyph0n 8y ago
        > Epic is using their cash to complete, and are trying to replace something people love with something worse. But this is the point: the fact that Epic is making "something worse" might be true now, but will change in the future. This is precisely what happened with Origin for example, at least in the perception of gamers.
- kyriakos 8y ago
  This is not the same as Netflix and competitors. No one is stopping a steam user from buying from epic store since its an one off purchase , but to watch an amazon exclusive you need an additional subscription.
  - dleslie 8y ago
    Except that the store itself is a deterrent, for a whole laundry list of reasons you can seek elsewhere. For me, the deal breakers are: 1. No user reviews. 2. Refund system is allegedly horrible and unreliable. 3. No cloud saves. 4. No mod workshop. 5. No forums. 6. No store-provided, NAT-punching, low latency networking. The last three have made for many of my best gaming experiences in recent years
    - mises 8y ago
      For me, one issue is the forty-something percent stake tencent has. Both in that I don't trust their software and that I have serious ethical concerns about directly supporting china. I know it's essentially impossible to not buy anything from them, but I would say videogames are definitely something people can easily stop buying.
    - cortesoft 8y ago
      You also can't buy a game for a friend.
    - kyriakos 8y ago
      That's just a matter of competition catching up though. From a consumer perspective multiple stores should have a positive effect. On the other hand streaming services are not benefiting the consumer directly.
      - dleslie 8y ago
        Those things cost money. It's where a good chunk of Valve's cut goes.
    - Joakal 8y ago
krispbyte 8y ago
Game piracy still exists. There's subreddits dedicated to tracking when DRM schemes are broken. Also piracy of region locked and old, difficult to buy now, console games has never disappeared. The games that are out of this are those that need online accounts to play.
rgoulter 8y ago
FWIW, in terms of exclusivity, there have been games exclusive to EA's Origin. (e.g. the 2017 Battlefront II). I'm not sure how significant "any added friction increases piracy" is in terms of numbers.
- dleslie 8y ago
  The difference is that people don't really hate exclusives on the publisher's own store unless the store is awful. IMHO: GFWL: awful and hated, dead now UPlay: awful and hated Steam: best in class and loved GoG: second best in class and accepted Origin: good and tolerated Blizzard: good and tolerated Epic: awful and hated
  - TheGRS 8y ago
    People hated Origin pretty bad, but EA stuck to their guns. IMO its a pretty awful experience. And to be honest Steam isn't exactly a great experience either. I noticed they're finally doing a face lift on their storefront soon, perhaps from the competition?
    - dleslie 8y ago
      At least Origin didn't vacuum up exclusives from non-EA publishers. People who hated Origin probably already hated EA, too. The Steam library update had been years in the making.
  - indigochill 8y ago
    I'd personally put GoG ahead of Steam, and not just for "grr Steam" reasons. Steam has a habit of breaking in weird ways like telling me I can't view my own achievements because my profile is private or suddenly wanting to download 0 bytes for half the games in my library. GoG on the other hand has been totally rock-solid for me.
    - dleslie 8y ago
      I prefer GoG, as well. I was attempting to express my understanding of the generally sentiment that I see from gamers I have a cron job that backs up my library every two weeks via lgogdownloader
sebazzz 8y ago
Difference is that it doesn't cost you anything to use Steam, Epic game store, or Origin. You buy the game, you have the game. You can install 5 game stores on your computer and that's it. For movies or TV series you need to have a subscription. That is the thing that costs money, even if you don't use it. People don't want to have 3 or 4 subscriptions, so that is why they pirate. This is not a problem I see happening for games.
- errantspark 8y ago
  It's still annoying to deal with any distribution platform that isn't Steam. I understand why things are this way, but it doesn't make it any better from my point of view. I hate having to add my friends on another platform to play Ape Legs or the new Unreal. I don't want to deal with another login, another stupid launcher that wants to be on all the time with incessant updates. I'm not going to end up pirating games because I mostly play F2P hat simulators, and the singleplayer games I care about are all available on GoG. It still all feels quite user-hostile. I can't think of a solution though.
  - meditate 8y ago
    The solution is to support single-sign-on and to allow data importing/export. These are solved problems, but companies don't receive enough pressure to do them because they are more interested in building moats.

omg_ketchup 8y ago

I really don't understand why everyone doesn't just offer all the movies all the time. These availability windows on shit is ridiculous. You wonder how pirates stay in business, it's because of availability windows and that region-locked bullshit. The Wolf of Wall Street came out like 10 years ago, and you're telling me the only way to watch it is to buy it for $15 on Amazon? Keep dreaming.

markbnj 8y ago
> I really don't understand why everyone doesn't just offer all the movies all the time. I don't have an expert answer, but I'll bet the answer has "copyright holders" in it somewhere.
- omg_ketchup 8y ago
  Sure, but why wouldn't they get paid based on streams of their copyrighted materials, or some other payment scheme? I mean, hey, it was good enough for video stores in the 90's, right? The equivalent of* Wolf of Wall Street sat on the shelf in Blockbuster for 15 years after it came out. They didn't have to hide it in the back because of an availability window.
  - secabeen 8y ago
    Well, part of that is that the price went down. When video stores were in their heyday, they often paid 5-6 times more for each tape in order to have public playback rights. The studios realized that they would make more money selling copies to individuals, but after that changed, the big rental chains changed to models where they paid the studios per-rental.
    - infogulch 8y ago
      You don't need any special rights to rent out physical copies of movies. Video stores, Netflix, Redbox all could just buy disks and tapes from the local market and rent them out directly. Sure, they can make a business deal to get better pricing and cut out the middleman, but this effectively puts a cap on that negotiation because the local market is always a fallback. When streaming deals fail there is no fallback, see Netflix's depleting catalog. The problem is that the experience of watching a movie at home only shifted a little bit during the transition from physical to streaming, while the legal and licensing framework between the two are so different they are hardly comparable. Copyright holders took great advantage of the change to a new format allowing them to redefine the meaning of licensing so that they have more control and can extract more value.

GuiA 8y ago

Ironically, an increasing number of parties has been having dollar signs in their eyes as of late, trying to get some of Steam's pie. It's entirely possible that this fate will befall the PC gaming industry at some point.

Razengan 8y ago

Without piracy, many third-world populations may have never been able to really use computers until about 2005-2010.

eikenberry 8y ago
You're off by 10-15 years as free software operating systems have been usable since at least the mid 90s. But there was a period before that which what you say was true which was one of the big reasons behind the GNU project.

agumonkey 8y ago

A subset of piracy, when I was a kid for instance, was not about service but clearly a pricing "problem" (the problem being: I was a kid)

amelius 8y ago

> TV and Movies on the other hand are getting worse every year, with Netflix focusing on their originals and everybody else doing their own streaming services. We seem to be at an all-time low of #Bittorrent seeders though.

mruts 8y ago
It’s unfortunate, even on private sites there aren’t as many seeders as they used to be. I have a hard time finding well seeded content from 90s, 80s, and 70s. 10 years ago, things were so much better.

meditate 8y ago

>Pirating games has never been as unattractive as it has been today due to Steam's monopoly and ubiquity. This is a cop out to me. I have never been a fan of DRM for this reason, because it requires an unassailable monopoly for customers not to notice that it's a problem. I am probably in the minority because I've never been happy with Steam's service because of this, but as long as they are the 800 pound gorilla in the room then they obviously never will listen to any of my complaints. If you take this line of thinking to movies, it leads to dangerous ideas like "everyone but my favorite streaming service should just close down" which is totally ridiculous, but still when I talk to friends about this issue they are quick to propose that as the solution! It really makes me try to avoid contact with the digital publishing industry as much as possible. What we see now is the movie studios' response to that which is: - To increase the size of the data dramatically (4K+ video) so that casual sharing requires hardware investment and thus remains difficult - To make things highly dependent on a very specialized backend to work correctly (Netflix's recent experiment with branching narratives) - To start bundling it with other things (Amazon Prime) - To offer streaming analytics as a better data platform than the traditional Nielsen ratings - And probably more I can't think of right now The thing is that these are all real value adds which I am glad to see them competing on. Right now all the downstream vendors are forced to invest in rolling their own DRM. I would rather see copyright holders offering a system where a proof of purchase can be transferred between services, but they would need to band together to actually do it and start putting that into their contracts. Can you imagine if we had that instead of DRM?

petetnt 8y ago
Steam is not DRM though and they offer lots of DRM free games too[0] https://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_Big_List_of_DRM-Free_Games_on_Steam https://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_Big_List_of_DRM-Free_Games...
- meditate 8y ago
  The issue I have is not that the vendor (Steam, Netflix, etc) is imposing DRM, but that the copyright holders demand it, and that there are cases where the vendor gives into these demands. You're right that Steam doesn't do this in all cases, but in some they do.

ohithereyou 8y ago

>Pirating games has never been as unattractive as it has been today due to Steam's monopoly and ubiquity. Hang around reddit's /r/crackwatch for some time and tell me how unattractive games piracy is.

gruez 8y ago

>> We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem [...] >And it's true Maybe I'm the exception, but given the choice of shelling out $60 (works out to just over 4 hours of work at median US pay), or waiting a few hours/days/weeks (depending on DRM strength) and getting it for free, I'm picking the latter every time. edit: changed average pay to median

ihattendorf 8y ago
If you can afford it, please pay for it. I get that not everyone can afford $60 games, but if you would have actually purchased it if pirating wasn't an option, please support the game.

screye 8y ago

We are seeing this happen as you speak. With game developers going back to proprietary launchers and platform exclusives, piracy of such games is rising again. I predict the new Metro and Borderlands games will be heavily pirated. When the epic launcher lacks more than half of the essential features of Steam, people will boycott your platform for forcing them to use it.

karmakaze 8y ago

The Steam thing makes sense. However I don't see how Netflix Originals is different than Steam.