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I just can't believe this. Almost every single person I knew back in the day who installed Limewire/Kazaa/Bearshare, bought an R4 cartridge or modded their Wii

I just can't believe this. Almost every single person I knew back in the day who installed Limewire/Kazaa/Bearshare, bought an R4 cartridge or modded their Wii went from buying at least a couple of pieces of genuine media each year to never buying one again. That being said, perhaps a more useful metric for calculating lost sales would be how many people acquired the technology used for piracy, rather than how many times they used it.

gscott 5y ago
At some point you get old enough to not want to bother with piracy because of the hassle if you have a decent first world income.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  As an adult, I tend to pirate or buy knockoff goods precisely when it becomes more of a hassle than buying the real thing. For example, having to go through every streaming app to work out which one has the show you want, or buying a piece of hardware sold by an American that hasn't even thought about logistics to any country that isn't the USA.
  - 12ian34 5y ago
    Side note: in case you didn't know, Google TV kind of solves the problem of having to go through every streaming app to find which one has the desired programme with a universal search. I just got it and find it useful.
    - AussieWog93 5y ago
      That's handy. Hopefully it stays universal - if they started charging a fee to streaming services to be included in the search we'd be back to square one.
      - throwaway3699 5y ago
        As far as I'm aware, it's just Google Search underneath but with telly included. I doubt they'll charge for inclusion but do expect ads.
    - happymellon 5y ago
      But then multiple services, like NowTV for example, don't support Google TV but do support Amazom Fire for some reason. Piracy for convenience happens again.
- besse 5y ago
  This is my experience. As a teenager I pirated about half the media I consumed. Now that I have a modest income I legally consume almost all my media (books, music and games), except for uni text books and scientific articles that aren't available through any of my libraries. I tried following my linear algebra course using freely available materials and/or 2nd hand text books, but constant "new" editions and access to online study portals made 2nd hand books impractical.
- murgindrag 5y ago
  That's my experience too. As a student, I didn't really buy the "piracy increases sales" studies, since I went from buying one thing a year to zero. Clearly, sales were lost. As an adult, I can casually swipe my credit card and buy similar things on a whim. How much less I bought as a student is a rounding error. Most people or organizations are either rich enough to not bother with piracy, or poor enough not to buy especially much in the first place. I'll mention this is doubly true with industrial software. Ain't no way an individual will drop $5k on a CAD program. On the other hand, ain't no way a serious business will pirate a $5k CAD program. Having people know how to use your tools, though, drives sales.
- baobabKoodaa 5y ago
  > At some point you get old enough to not want to bother with piracy because of the hassle if you have a decent first world income. Partially disagree. For things like music and tv series, there's more hassle when acquiring the product via "official" channels. For example, when I want to download a music video, I can just go on youtube and I can download the video with one click (using "unofficial" software). If I wanted to use "official" channels to purchase a copy of the music video, I would have to spend a lot of time just finding out which service sells it, then figure out if they actually sell this piece of music or merely rent it out, then figure out a method to register and pay, etc. In the end I have no idea if I will even acquire a mp4 file or some kind of DRM time bomb. I can't fathom why anybody would feel like buying music is less of a hassle than downloading music without buying it.
  - vinay427 5y ago
    Nearly everyone I know doesn't usually bother with music piracy because of Spotify and their competitors, which offer listening to nearly every song imaginable in a format that's IMO far more convenient than the MP3 days, piracy or otherwise.
    - baobabKoodaa 5y ago
      I'm not talking about the convenience of "the MP3 days", I'm talking about the convenience today. The example I provided was one-click downloading a music video. You countered this with the ability to... stream audio temporarily from Spotify? Not sure how that's relevant. Does Spotify allow you to download mp4 music videos?
      - vinay427 5y ago
        Your point seemed to be about "music" before veering into an example with music videos, in which I have no experience. > For things like music and tv series, there's more hassle when acquiring the product via "official" channels. > I can't fathom why anybody would feel like buying music is less of a hassle than downloading music without buying it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
kebman 5y ago
There's several factors at play here. Some people view piracy as the opportunity to "try something out" before buying. This means they only buy the thing they actually liked. On the other hand, services such as Steam—which has made getting games both cheaper and easier—is probably capturing a lot of those guys who would previously do piracy, simply because it's a lot less hassle to just buy it on there. And also the price isn't horrible either, unless the game is brand new (though the matter of ownership is still an issue, though not very relevant to this discussion). Also, I know more than one person who resorted to piracy, simply because the thing wasn't available in their country yet, or because the site that sells the authorized thing either has a prohibitively expensive price, or because the service is just prohibitively bad, thus making it comparably more easy to simply pirate the thing.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  >Some people view piracy as the opportunity to "try something out" before buying. I have met precisely one person in real life who does this, and he was far enough on the Autism spectrum to receive a government-funded integration aide for the first 6 years of school. Every other person I know pirates because it's easier than acquiring the real product, they can get a pirated version before the official version is released, or they just simply want to save money. I personally pirate because I can't be bothered looking through 6 different streaming apps to see which one has Terminator 2 on it. Apparently I'm not alone in this regard; piracy has started to rise again since everybody pulled their content from Netflix. Yes, it's just anecdata, but I would be shocked if more than 5% of pirates intended to purchase genuine copies of the media they actually liked.
  - stavros 5y ago
    I do this and I haven't received any aid.
    - AussieWog93 5y ago
      >I haven't received any aid Maybe because Greece is broke? :P But seriously, I wasn't trying to imply that everybody who uses piracy to demo things need help - it's just extremely uncommon/unusual to buy a piece of genuine media when you already having a working pirate copy.
croes 5y ago
And then came Spotify and they recognized people are willing to pay.
- hulitu 5y ago
  There are people who are willing to pay for spotify. The problem with Spotify and other streaming services is that they don't offer quality ( they offer opus). Want to hear a song ? If you're lucky you get mp3 (or opus) quality. Want to stream a movie ? Depends on your ISP, weather and other factors. All streaming services offer "up to". Nothing is guaranteed. I also have " gigabit " internet. If I'm lucky i get a couple (2-3) of hundred MB/s. Usually is 7-800 kB/s.
  - oriolid 5y ago
    The problem might be that you have a 7-8 mbit connection and the content providers use bandwidth scaling. I have an actual gigabit connection and Spotify is indistinguishable from uncompressed audio. Of course there's Tidal and probably some others that have lossless compression if you think you can hear the difference. Some sources claim that everyone else than Spotify pays the artists better, which might be also a reason use other services (unless you believe that the artists' work should be free).
    - CuriousSkeptic 5y ago
      > unless you believe that the artists' work should be free Interesting, “work” is kind of ambiguous in that sentence. Either it means the labor or it means the artistic creation. Anyways I want to think that there are a multitude of ways to allow global unfettered reach of the latter while ensuring the former has adequate funding. I mean everyone is free to buy practically any pizza, in practically any form, from practically anyone, and still people get paid to come up with novel recipes. For digital media I think YouTube and GitHub are the type of space to focus on. Compared to Spotify they are almost the kind of free services one could imagine a copyright free Netflix and Spotify could look like. You don’t find many multi million dollar productions on the ad-financed YouTube. (You do on the completely free GitHub though). It would be interesting to find out if there are other models for YouTube-like media to get access to that kind of funds, pretty sure ads aren’t it, and copyright seems to lead to the Netflix problem. Patreon and selling merch does it share to finance the channels I watch. But also seems limited in what can be expected. LWN has this interesting freemium model of keeping the latest edition for subscribers only (unless they share a link), it’s kind of what Kickstarter things do too no? Some extra perks for those is provide t he funding. Personally I would be happy to pay for “premium” YouTube subscriptions for channels doing a LWN like thing. Would probably prefer to do that through a meta-subscription service (like patreon?) built into the consumption experience to lower the barrier. For music I see no reason these models shouldn’t be adequate. Film could be a bit mor problematic, seems like those are being replaced with series anyways though, so perhaps a good pilot is enough to secure funding for subsequent episodes.
sschueller 5y ago
How many people stopped pirating when Apple made it extremely easy to buy music for $1? Remember when you were forced the buy the whole album for just one song? The biggest issue is and always will be accessibility and ease of access and these two are hindered by outdated global licensing agreements. If you sell be a DVD with DRM that takes longer to start playing than a copy I downloaded. I will download it. If you force me to watch unskipable 10 year old ads before I can play my purchased DVD I will pirate that movie.
- Krisando 5y ago
  > How many people stopped pirating when Apple made it extremely easy to buy music for $1? I can't think of any that stopped honestly or even owned an Apple product. Apple products are expensive.
  - freeflight 5y ago
    That's not really relevant to the question asked there: You don't need to own an Apple product to buy music trough iTunes. If you wanted just that one song then iTunes was very much the most affordable, and accessible, way to legally buy digital music back then because it only charged you $1 for a song. The only other alternatives where, often legally rather obscure, flatrate subscription models or buying the physical full album, which would usually have cost you at least $20+ Valve did something very similar with Steam: Very easy to use and it actually passed on the savings from digital distribution to the consumers by heavily discounting the prices of games.
    - shaan7 5y ago
      Yep exactly! I personally don't find Apple products useful but man I love iTunes just because I can buy DRM-free music. I wish buying movies was this easy.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      I tried iTunes on Windows once. Horrendously clunky UI, not at all what one would have expected from the vaunted "intuitive" Apple.
salamandersauce 5y ago
I bought a DS flashcard to play Pokémon Black with a translation patch early and then bought it day 1, don't remember using it for much more. I modded my Wii but still bought games like Skyward sword. How old were the people back in the day? In high school I pirated a lot more because I literally had no money.
EugeneOZ 5y ago
And my experience is 100% contrary. All my schoolmates were playing pirated games (there were no others in Russia, even if it's difficult for you to imagine that). But as soon as Steam appeared, we've switched to Steam and started buying games legally. I own 292 purchased games in Steam (I've just launched Steam to check this number), around 15 in Origin, 5 in GOG and around 10 bought in Epic.
benhurmarcel 5y ago
When I was a teenager I pirated every single song and PC video game. And yet, I haven’t pirated one ever since I got my own bank account, Steam, and Spotify. It’s really a convenience and accessibility issue.
mikewarot 5y ago
I used to buy a few CDs a year, $20 for one good song?? Then Napster came along, and I found all sorts of good stuff, and I started buying a few CDs/week because I knew they had good songs on them, and were better quality audio that the stuff on Napster. I bought a few hundred CDs at full Best Buy Retail prices!, then the record companies started suing their customers, and I've never bought a new CD since. I've given up on music in general. I'll listen to the radio in the car, but that's it. If I really want to here a song, its on Youtube somewhere.

gscott 5y ago

At some point you get old enough to not want to bother with piracy because of the hassle if you have a decent first world income.

AussieWog93 5y ago
As an adult, I tend to pirate or buy knockoff goods precisely when it becomes more of a hassle than buying the real thing. For example, having to go through every streaming app to work out which one has the show you want, or buying a piece of hardware sold by an American that hasn't even thought about logistics to any country that isn't the USA.
- 12ian34 5y ago
  Side note: in case you didn't know, Google TV kind of solves the problem of having to go through every streaming app to find which one has the desired programme with a universal search. I just got it and find it useful.
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    That's handy. Hopefully it stays universal - if they started charging a fee to streaming services to be included in the search we'd be back to square one.
    - throwaway3699 5y ago
      As far as I'm aware, it's just Google Search underneath but with telly included. I doubt they'll charge for inclusion but do expect ads.
  - happymellon 5y ago
    But then multiple services, like NowTV for example, don't support Google TV but do support Amazom Fire for some reason. Piracy for convenience happens again.
besse 5y ago
This is my experience. As a teenager I pirated about half the media I consumed. Now that I have a modest income I legally consume almost all my media (books, music and games), except for uni text books and scientific articles that aren't available through any of my libraries. I tried following my linear algebra course using freely available materials and/or 2nd hand text books, but constant "new" editions and access to online study portals made 2nd hand books impractical.
murgindrag 5y ago
That's my experience too. As a student, I didn't really buy the "piracy increases sales" studies, since I went from buying one thing a year to zero. Clearly, sales were lost. As an adult, I can casually swipe my credit card and buy similar things on a whim. How much less I bought as a student is a rounding error. Most people or organizations are either rich enough to not bother with piracy, or poor enough not to buy especially much in the first place. I'll mention this is doubly true with industrial software. Ain't no way an individual will drop $5k on a CAD program. On the other hand, ain't no way a serious business will pirate a $5k CAD program. Having people know how to use your tools, though, drives sales.
baobabKoodaa 5y ago
> At some point you get old enough to not want to bother with piracy because of the hassle if you have a decent first world income. Partially disagree. For things like music and tv series, there's more hassle when acquiring the product via "official" channels. For example, when I want to download a music video, I can just go on youtube and I can download the video with one click (using "unofficial" software). If I wanted to use "official" channels to purchase a copy of the music video, I would have to spend a lot of time just finding out which service sells it, then figure out if they actually sell this piece of music or merely rent it out, then figure out a method to register and pay, etc. In the end I have no idea if I will even acquire a mp4 file or some kind of DRM time bomb. I can't fathom why anybody would feel like buying music is less of a hassle than downloading music without buying it.
- vinay427 5y ago
  Nearly everyone I know doesn't usually bother with music piracy because of Spotify and their competitors, which offer listening to nearly every song imaginable in a format that's IMO far more convenient than the MP3 days, piracy or otherwise.
  - baobabKoodaa 5y ago
    I'm not talking about the convenience of "the MP3 days", I'm talking about the convenience today. The example I provided was one-click downloading a music video. You countered this with the ability to... stream audio temporarily from Spotify? Not sure how that's relevant. Does Spotify allow you to download mp4 music videos?
    - vinay427 5y ago
      Your point seemed to be about "music" before veering into an example with music videos, in which I have no experience. > For things like music and tv series, there's more hassle when acquiring the product via "official" channels. > I can't fathom why anybody would feel like buying music is less of a hassle than downloading music without buying it.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

kebman 5y ago

There's several factors at play here. Some people view piracy as the opportunity to "try something out" before buying. This means they only buy the thing they actually liked. On the other hand, services such as Steam—which has made getting games both cheaper and easier—is probably capturing a lot of those guys who would previously do piracy, simply because it's a lot less hassle to just buy it on there. And also the price isn't horrible either, unless the game is brand new (though the matter of ownership is still an issue, though not very relevant to this discussion). Also, I know more than one person who resorted to piracy, simply because the thing wasn't available in their country yet, or because the site that sells the authorized thing either has a prohibitively expensive price, or because the service is just prohibitively bad, thus making it comparably more easy to simply pirate the thing.

AussieWog93 5y ago
>Some people view piracy as the opportunity to "try something out" before buying. I have met precisely one person in real life who does this, and he was far enough on the Autism spectrum to receive a government-funded integration aide for the first 6 years of school. Every other person I know pirates because it's easier than acquiring the real product, they can get a pirated version before the official version is released, or they just simply want to save money. I personally pirate because I can't be bothered looking through 6 different streaming apps to see which one has Terminator 2 on it. Apparently I'm not alone in this regard; piracy has started to rise again since everybody pulled their content from Netflix. Yes, it's just anecdata, but I would be shocked if more than 5% of pirates intended to purchase genuine copies of the media they actually liked.
- stavros 5y ago
  I do this and I haven't received any aid.
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    >I haven't received any aid Maybe because Greece is broke? :P But seriously, I wasn't trying to imply that everybody who uses piracy to demo things need help - it's just extremely uncommon/unusual to buy a piece of genuine media when you already having a working pirate copy.

croes 5y ago

And then came Spotify and they recognized people are willing to pay.

hulitu 5y ago
There are people who are willing to pay for spotify. The problem with Spotify and other streaming services is that they don't offer quality ( they offer opus). Want to hear a song ? If you're lucky you get mp3 (or opus) quality. Want to stream a movie ? Depends on your ISP, weather and other factors. All streaming services offer "up to". Nothing is guaranteed. I also have " gigabit " internet. If I'm lucky i get a couple (2-3) of hundred MB/s. Usually is 7-800 kB/s.
- oriolid 5y ago
  The problem might be that you have a 7-8 mbit connection and the content providers use bandwidth scaling. I have an actual gigabit connection and Spotify is indistinguishable from uncompressed audio. Of course there's Tidal and probably some others that have lossless compression if you think you can hear the difference. Some sources claim that everyone else than Spotify pays the artists better, which might be also a reason use other services (unless you believe that the artists' work should be free).
  - CuriousSkeptic 5y ago
    > unless you believe that the artists' work should be free Interesting, “work” is kind of ambiguous in that sentence. Either it means the labor or it means the artistic creation. Anyways I want to think that there are a multitude of ways to allow global unfettered reach of the latter while ensuring the former has adequate funding. I mean everyone is free to buy practically any pizza, in practically any form, from practically anyone, and still people get paid to come up with novel recipes. For digital media I think YouTube and GitHub are the type of space to focus on. Compared to Spotify they are almost the kind of free services one could imagine a copyright free Netflix and Spotify could look like. You don’t find many multi million dollar productions on the ad-financed YouTube. (You do on the completely free GitHub though). It would be interesting to find out if there are other models for YouTube-like media to get access to that kind of funds, pretty sure ads aren’t it, and copyright seems to lead to the Netflix problem. Patreon and selling merch does it share to finance the channels I watch. But also seems limited in what can be expected. LWN has this interesting freemium model of keeping the latest edition for subscribers only (unless they share a link), it’s kind of what Kickstarter things do too no? Some extra perks for those is provide t he funding. Personally I would be happy to pay for “premium” YouTube subscriptions for channels doing a LWN like thing. Would probably prefer to do that through a meta-subscription service (like patreon?) built into the consumption experience to lower the barrier. For music I see no reason these models shouldn’t be adequate. Film could be a bit mor problematic, seems like those are being replaced with series anyways though, so perhaps a good pilot is enough to secure funding for subsequent episodes.

sschueller 5y ago

How many people stopped pirating when Apple made it extremely easy to buy music for $1? Remember when you were forced the buy the whole album for just one song? The biggest issue is and always will be accessibility and ease of access and these two are hindered by outdated global licensing agreements. If you sell be a DVD with DRM that takes longer to start playing than a copy I downloaded. I will download it. If you force me to watch unskipable 10 year old ads before I can play my purchased DVD I will pirate that movie.

Krisando 5y ago
> How many people stopped pirating when Apple made it extremely easy to buy music for $1? I can't think of any that stopped honestly or even owned an Apple product. Apple products are expensive.
- freeflight 5y ago
  That's not really relevant to the question asked there: You don't need to own an Apple product to buy music trough iTunes. If you wanted just that one song then iTunes was very much the most affordable, and accessible, way to legally buy digital music back then because it only charged you $1 for a song. The only other alternatives where, often legally rather obscure, flatrate subscription models or buying the physical full album, which would usually have cost you at least $20+ Valve did something very similar with Steam: Very easy to use and it actually passed on the savings from digital distribution to the consumers by heavily discounting the prices of games.
  - shaan7 5y ago
    Yep exactly! I personally don't find Apple products useful but man I love iTunes just because I can buy DRM-free music. I wish buying movies was this easy.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    I tried iTunes on Windows once. Horrendously clunky UI, not at all what one would have expected from the vaunted "intuitive" Apple.

salamandersauce 5y ago

I bought a DS flashcard to play Pokémon Black with a translation patch early and then bought it day 1, don't remember using it for much more. I modded my Wii but still bought games like Skyward sword. How old were the people back in the day? In high school I pirated a lot more because I literally had no money.

EugeneOZ 5y ago

And my experience is 100% contrary. All my schoolmates were playing pirated games (there were no others in Russia, even if it's difficult for you to imagine that). But as soon as Steam appeared, we've switched to Steam and started buying games legally. I own 292 purchased games in Steam (I've just launched Steam to check this number), around 15 in Origin, 5 in GOG and around 10 bought in Epic.

benhurmarcel 5y ago

When I was a teenager I pirated every single song and PC video game. And yet, I haven’t pirated one ever since I got my own bank account, Steam, and Spotify. It’s really a convenience and accessibility issue.

mikewarot 5y ago

I used to buy a few CDs a year, $20 for one good song?? Then Napster came along, and I found all sorts of good stuff, and I started buying a few CDs/week because I knew they had good songs on them, and were better quality audio that the stuff on Napster. I bought a few hundred CDs at full Best Buy Retail prices!, then the record companies started suing their customers, and I've never bought a new CD since. I've given up on music in general. I'll listen to the radio in the car, but that's it. If I really want to here a song, its on Youtube somewhere.