22 ms·

EU Buried $400k Study Showing Piracy Have Almost No Effect on Sales (2017)

260 points by rg111 5y ago

yonaguska 5y ago
So it's not about piracy. It's all about justifying the implementation of tools used to control the free flow of information.
- cuteboy19 5y ago
  I think we have collectively been in enough meetings to know the real reason: management just wants to do something to appear tough on piracy
  - rg111 5y ago
    Also gets attaboys from the board and shareholders!
  - stuu99 5y ago
    Nah it's about control. They want to kill piracy, mark my words what do you think Steam, denvuo, and other forms if account based drm are? They are going to build denuvo into the OS with future exe's so they can disable them like they got on consoles, aka if you mod or hack your Wii or xbox, new games force update the bios and communicate out over the wire to brick your machine if they detect modded console. They want to bring similar tech to the PC, windows 10 and window 11 is the beginning of trusted computing (you no longer own you pc) and honest plaintext binaries. They are changing how exe's function. UWP was a trial run. When you crack a UWP they only work on certain versions of windows. https://www.theregister.com/2001/12/13/the_microsoft_secure_pc_ms/ https://www.theregister.com/2001/12/13/the_microsoft_secure_...
    - hedgewitch 5y ago
      > Steam This is a bad example because Steam's DRM is notoriously terrible and even multiplayer games that use Steam's multiplayer services can be played entirely without Steam with a particular open-source emulator (granted they don't also have their own servers that you connect to, which is an entirely different issue). Windows 11 and TPM are definitely points towards most computing moving in the direction that Mac OS has. The thing to remember, though, is that most users don't actually care. They only care if your bog standard apps run.
      - stuu99 5y ago
        >This is a bad example because Steam's DRM is notoriously terrible You don't grasp Valve and the industry has already won any game where the networking code has been pulled out already acts like DRM, any client-server app requiring username and login accounts, or has some piece of code living on some remote server, means you no longer own your own stuff. Valve and the rest of the computing industry is boiling you all slowly. AKA look at this list of games from crackwatch. https://old.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/p9ak4n/crack_watch_games/ https://old.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/p9ak4n/crack_wa... You'll notice more and more games are "online only". Diablo 3 is literally diablo 2 /w drm, they wanted to kill piracy. Starcraft remastered, and reforged require internet to play, that means we've lost the battle. The public has eaten up client-server back ended games. You don't get that the whole point was to monopolize their own products and kill the local infinitely copyable binaries PC games used to be coded as, AKA PRe steam 99% of games were complete you got singleplayer+multiplayer inside the same game. MMO's/F2P are literally just PC games with their multiplayer ripped out, don't think so? Listen to the ultima devs here, when Ultima online was successful, publishers and devs went over their entire PC game list to convert their local apps to client-server apps and stuck "MMO" on the front so they could steal PC games from the public. https://youtu.be/lnnsDi7Sxq0?t=1134 https://youtu.be/lnnsDi7Sxq0?t=1134 EA killed ultima 9 when the UO beta got massive interest, that lead to the death of PC games as local applications, the industry from then on there was a massive war to back end all PC games, they couldn't immediately do that to quake and urneal because we'd been treated too good with Warcraft 1-3, Descent 1-3, Quake 1-3, and build engine games like Duke 3d. The entire industry has always wanted to kill piracy and Ultima online gave the entire industry the go ahead once they realized that many of our fellow programmers and gamers were irrationally stupid beyond their wildest dreams. Anyone playing quake and Descent at the time fear the loss of dedicated servers and level editors which used to come with the games, we knew if Ultima online was successful that Publishers would want to back end every fucking PC game and that's the end of the personal computer and the return of IBM and mainframe computing. "Signed exe's" and trusted computing is the return of mainframe computing of the 60's in new bullshit language but I don't expect the mmo/steam generation to do anything but froth at the mouth. When they were the ones killing gaming and gave birth to microtransactions. You can't put MTX in diablo 1, warcraft 1-3, or starcraft 1 because they are local applications that run entirely from your pc. None of the code has been stolen out of the game carved back behind a user account and login requirement. Like with most PC games these days. We're losing gaming history and generation mmo is to blame for their general cluelessness of the evil of mainframe computing.
- Veuxdo 5y ago
  Let's not turn this place into r/technology
- mminer237 5y ago
  Why would companies want to spend money to control the spread of their products if they made just as much money without it?
  - aaomidi 5y ago
    Because despite popular belief, market economies aren't as efficient as we think and they add bureaucracy even when it's not logical to do so. Useless jobs covers this quite well. But the tldr is that assuming the market runs in logical is a flawed assumption and that the market adds inefficiencies on its own.
missedthecue 5y ago
"That does not necessarily mean that piracy has no effect but only that the statistical analysis does not prove with sufficient reliability that there is an effect. An exception is the displacement of recent top films. The results show a displacement rate of 40 per cent which means that for every ten recent top films watched illegally, four fewer films are consumed legally" From the study
- rg111 5y ago
  The article also mentions that piracy did not have much effect in legal consumption of books, music, and games. People felt that prices were "fairer" in these media. Games piracy even led to people buying more games than what they would have bought without piracy. People felt that piracy in movies and TV is justified because the price is too high.
  - native_samples 5y ago
    But that would clearly be wrong. Games companies have been reliably investing in DRM for 30 years and it's not because they're all idiots. Occasionally executives talk about this. Piracy rates for PC games without DRM can approach 95% and they can see in their sales curves the huge drop that occurs when a working crack is released. For a large enough game with a stable and predictable enough sales curve, it's easy to work out lost sales, because the curves start high and rapidly decay to zero in any case. That's why people outside the industry often think game copy protection doesn't work. They judge it by a standard of "it is never ever cracked" which games companies don't care about. Most sales are within the first 3 months or so. After that it dwindles and after 6 months it's become long tail; the studio has moved on unless it's an indie shop that plans to work on the same game for years. If a copy protection lasts 3-4 months it's ideal, if it lasts a year it means they put too much effort into it and could have made more money by making a faster but weaker protection. The resulting equilibrium is thus frequently mis-understood as "failure" by armchair studio executives.
- danuker 5y ago
  It could be that, for media other than recent top films: A) the effect is so small, that it's invisible to the study B) the study is so small, that even large effects are invisible
stutsmansoft 5y ago
No effect? My own experience differs. I had an iOS product that was doing well, and it had some DRM to prevent jailbreakers. I had a legitimate buyer complain and after soul-searching I removed the DRM. Sales immediately dropped to near zero and never recovered. So at least in my experience, piracy affected sales.
- szundi 5y ago
  That would mean that it was only used by jailbroken iDevices?
  - viktorcode 5y ago
    Not necessarily. Jailbroken device is needed to produce decrypted dump which is packaged back into an application file. This file then can be signed with a third party service using either an enterprise account or the personal user account (in which case it must be re-signed periodically).
  - Shared404 5y ago
    I could see that being the case if it was a power user focused app.
- amelius 5y ago
  What price was it sold for?
  - Veuxdo 5y ago
    Why does it matter?
    - cgriswald 5y ago
      Does curiosity need justification? > Overall,the analysis indicates that for films and TV-series current prices are higher than 80 per cent of the illegal downloaders and streamers are willing to pay. For books, music and games prices are at a level broadly corresponding to the willingness to pay of illegal downloaders and streamers. It would be interesting to know to what degree price is a factor in app piracy.
IYasha 5y ago
It was discussed before, AFAIR. But it's one of those things people better be reminded about.
colordrops 5y ago
If it doesn't hurt sales what is the purpose to burying this?
- hedgewitch 5y ago
  ...to push the narrative that piracy is evil and they need to take more measures against it.
  - cortesoft 5y ago
    Right, but if rights holders learn that piracy doesn’t effect their bottom line, why would they care?
    - hedgewitch 5y ago
      Why do any rightsholders care about anything? Because it's about risk management and looking like they're actively protecting their IPs.
    - slothtrop 5y ago
      They still don't like that people can pirate, whether or not in impacts their bottom line. Also because they're so vigilant about protect their IP, that's kind of an extension of the behavior
    - rg111 5y ago
      They would care forbtwo reasons: 1. Their shareholders would be happy. And the CEO will get attaboys from board members. Taking a tough stance on Piracy costs a CEO nothing. Anecdotes matter little, but I have seen in many cases, when gaming companies adopted new DRMs, people actually bought their shares. And not dumb people, too. 2. There are some assholes who don't want poor people having their things. Some do it for the image purpose. Think of Apple hardware. Older models can easily be sold at a much lower price. Save some very old iPhone SEs, they don't do that. If every Tom, Dick, and Harry owns something, it dilutes a product's value to many people. People want to own rare and exotic things.
nextlevelwizard 5y ago
I am not that suprised. Piracy is mostly conducted by teens and young adults who don't have the captial to buy whatever they are pirating. After people grow up a bit and start making money they usually also pick up other hobbies (which they couldn't participate for lack of funding previously) which cuts into their pirated media consumption and on top of that now they can afford to buy said media and now with streaming platforms it is easier than ever just to pay a small monthy fee and get access to quite large pool of media (even though video streaming services are doing their best to ruin this). For me now days there aren't many reasons to pirate stuff because everything is available from streaming services, I just subscribe for a month to watch whatever movie/series I'm after. With games, most new titles are single player games which I don't care at all about and multiplayer games are either cheap or free. And Spotify handles music very well.
_fat_santa 5y ago
The solution to piracy is not taking measures to prevent it, but rather offering a product so pirating would seem like a terrible alternative. Take Spotify as a prime example. When I was a kid I pirated music like it was no ones business. I didn't really stop until Spotify came to the US and signed up. For the price of $10/month, I could listen to all the music I ever wanted. Even though at that point I had a good system for pirating music, I pretty much gave up pirating music because Spotify was just so damn good. Spotify in my eyes, rather than trying to stop music piracy, just started to compete with it.
- ramadis 5y ago
  I felt the same way about Netflix when it first started. Now, there are dozens of competitors with different catalogues, making piracy enticing for people once again.
  - slothtrop 5y ago
    Speaking as a consumer, that in itself doesn't make it enticing. If there was very little worthwhile content on 1-2 platforms, maybe, but since I'm not the "binging" type who absolutely needs to see every hyped show right now, I can't be arsed and find there's already enough to see. Between Netflix and Prime, you're not spending that much and you sure as hell don't need a dozen subscriptions to watch every good show.
    - morelisp 5y ago
      I think there are still enough people who remember 2010-era Starz on Netflix (and with the massive DVD catalogue for the rest). Everything, on every single service, has been downhill since then.
    - toper-centage 5y ago
      I'm the same as you. I subscribe to Netflix so long as there's something I'm watching, then stop. Then I might subscribe to something else. People that complain about having to pay for all services are just power users, and I think it's fair that I don't pay as much as them.
relix 5y ago
I do wonder the effect it has on "total leisure time spend". My hypothesis is that piracy drops total spend in dollars, but maybe not necessarily on the category that was pirated. This would fit and counter the oft-claimed "if I couldn't pirate this I wouldn't have bought it anyway, so it's not a lost sale". I hypothese there would be two reasons: - because piracy enables more consumption of some media than the person otherwise would have done, it means they have less leisure time available to spend on other media which they would have spent money on. E.g. instead of buying a book and reading it, they would watch a low-value movie they pirated, affecting book sales but not movie sales - because piracy decreases the perceived value of an hour of entertainment, the person would be less willing to spend money in other categories as well and would rather fall back to cheaper options The result would be that the amount a person spends on _total_ entertainment drops, but the drop would be in other categories than the category that is piratable.
- rg111 5y ago
  > My hypothesis is that piracy drops total spend in dollars My hypothesis is the exact opposite. I think that piracy increases total spend in dollars. With piracy, people get to experience things for free that they otherwise wouldn't have. This opens individuals to newer media, newer niches, newer genres, and so on. I have known a few people who spent their money for the first time on video games after playing the pirated version of GTA V. They wouldn't have spent a dime on games if they hadn't played pirated GTA V. I turned into a subscriber after watching The Wire, The Sporanos, and Breaking Bad with a shared password (also a kind of piracy). I would have never even thought of paying for TV if I could not watch The Wire for free. I believe that pirated content "converts" people into web series watchers, gamers, and more. Microsoft is fully aware of Windows piracy. Had Microsoft cracked down, then they would have lost tens of millions of future paying customers. Many people pay for Office for their business because that is what they have used since their childhood- in a legal way or not.
- hackerfromthefu 5y ago
  Conversely, maybe the amount income people have to spend on entertainment is a function of their disposable income, so fixed by the persons financial circumstances rather than entertainment costs. i.e. if you got $20 bucks spare and a movie is $20 you watch one, if they are $10 you watch 2. Over simplified, but I think an important point, that entertainment fits into the budget of 'disposable' income rather than essential.
throwy1 5y ago
This is going to not be popular, but piracy has effect on sales. Ignore the US market for a bit, I know market in India for example has a real effect. In India piracy was rampant and it was leading to loss in sales. At one point folks used pirate movies, make them into CDs and sell them for 80 rupees each. This used to happen immediately after a movie was released. This was so widespread that these CDs were available everywhere and everyone with a CD burner would do and sell. The movie studios then adopted streaming immediately and now most movies are available very quickly after a release and so ease of availability at a higher quality made buying CDs a moot point, even for folks low on cash. It feels to me that the whole concept of DRM and freedom is mostly done from a US point of view where a dollar is nothing and people don't even pick up a dime or a quarter they find on the road.
- freedomben 5y ago
  I've never been to India, but I bought a decent number of pirated CDs and DVDs from people (including Indians) when I lived in Doha, Qatar in the mid 00s. They were cheap, but extremely unreliable in quality. Many of the discs simply didn't work, and of those that did, there was a good chance you were getting a "camcorder in the theatre" version complete with terrible picture, sound and people coughing. I did the math at one point and I spent more on piracy than if I'd just bought legit copies over the internet.
LoveMortuus 5y ago
“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.” -Gabe Newell
- Veuxdo 5y ago
  Considering that Steam games and music are still widely pirated today, I'd say this quote doesn't hold up.
  - mafuy 5y ago
    Considering that Steam was a huge success, initiated a new era of gaming and is selling billions of dollars in games, I'd say it does hold up.
fsflover 5y ago
See also: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%20piracy%20study&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
dudul 5y ago
Piracy affects sales when companies try to fight it with things that make their product awful. No way I'm buying a video game that requires a constant internet connection, even to play solo. No way I'm buying a movie, book or song that can only work on a specific device via a dumb app that I need to install.

260 points by rg111 5y ago

So it's not about piracy. It's all about justifying the implementation of tools used to control the free flow of information.

cuteboy19 5y ago
I think we have collectively been in enough meetings to know the real reason: management just wants to do something to appear tough on piracy
- rg111 5y ago
  Also gets attaboys from the board and shareholders!
- stuu99 5y ago
  Nah it's about control. They want to kill piracy, mark my words what do you think Steam, denvuo, and other forms if account based drm are? They are going to build denuvo into the OS with future exe's so they can disable them like they got on consoles, aka if you mod or hack your Wii or xbox, new games force update the bios and communicate out over the wire to brick your machine if they detect modded console. They want to bring similar tech to the PC, windows 10 and window 11 is the beginning of trusted computing (you no longer own you pc) and honest plaintext binaries. They are changing how exe's function. UWP was a trial run. When you crack a UWP they only work on certain versions of windows. https://www.theregister.com/2001/12/13/the_microsoft_secure_pc_ms/ https://www.theregister.com/2001/12/13/the_microsoft_secure_...
  - hedgewitch 5y ago
    > Steam This is a bad example because Steam's DRM is notoriously terrible and even multiplayer games that use Steam's multiplayer services can be played entirely without Steam with a particular open-source emulator (granted they don't also have their own servers that you connect to, which is an entirely different issue). Windows 11 and TPM are definitely points towards most computing moving in the direction that Mac OS has. The thing to remember, though, is that most users don't actually care. They only care if your bog standard apps run.
    - stuu99 5y ago
      >This is a bad example because Steam's DRM is notoriously terrible You don't grasp Valve and the industry has already won any game where the networking code has been pulled out already acts like DRM, any client-server app requiring username and login accounts, or has some piece of code living on some remote server, means you no longer own your own stuff. Valve and the rest of the computing industry is boiling you all slowly. AKA look at this list of games from crackwatch. https://old.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/p9ak4n/crack_watch_games/ https://old.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/p9ak4n/crack_wa... You'll notice more and more games are "online only". Diablo 3 is literally diablo 2 /w drm, they wanted to kill piracy. Starcraft remastered, and reforged require internet to play, that means we've lost the battle. The public has eaten up client-server back ended games. You don't get that the whole point was to monopolize their own products and kill the local infinitely copyable binaries PC games used to be coded as, AKA PRe steam 99% of games were complete you got singleplayer+multiplayer inside the same game. MMO's/F2P are literally just PC games with their multiplayer ripped out, don't think so? Listen to the ultima devs here, when Ultima online was successful, publishers and devs went over their entire PC game list to convert their local apps to client-server apps and stuck "MMO" on the front so they could steal PC games from the public. https://youtu.be/lnnsDi7Sxq0?t=1134 https://youtu.be/lnnsDi7Sxq0?t=1134 EA killed ultima 9 when the UO beta got massive interest, that lead to the death of PC games as local applications, the industry from then on there was a massive war to back end all PC games, they couldn't immediately do that to quake and urneal because we'd been treated too good with Warcraft 1-3, Descent 1-3, Quake 1-3, and build engine games like Duke 3d. The entire industry has always wanted to kill piracy and Ultima online gave the entire industry the go ahead once they realized that many of our fellow programmers and gamers were irrationally stupid beyond their wildest dreams. Anyone playing quake and Descent at the time fear the loss of dedicated servers and level editors which used to come with the games, we knew if Ultima online was successful that Publishers would want to back end every fucking PC game and that's the end of the personal computer and the return of IBM and mainframe computing. "Signed exe's" and trusted computing is the return of mainframe computing of the 60's in new bullshit language but I don't expect the mmo/steam generation to do anything but froth at the mouth. When they were the ones killing gaming and gave birth to microtransactions. You can't put MTX in diablo 1, warcraft 1-3, or starcraft 1 because they are local applications that run entirely from your pc. None of the code has been stolen out of the game carved back behind a user account and login requirement. Like with most PC games these days. We're losing gaming history and generation mmo is to blame for their general cluelessness of the evil of mainframe computing.
Veuxdo 5y ago
Let's not turn this place into r/technology
mminer237 5y ago
Why would companies want to spend money to control the spread of their products if they made just as much money without it?
- aaomidi 5y ago
  Because despite popular belief, market economies aren't as efficient as we think and they add bureaucracy even when it's not logical to do so. Useless jobs covers this quite well. But the tldr is that assuming the market runs in logical is a flawed assumption and that the market adds inefficiencies on its own.

missedthecue 5y ago

"That does not necessarily mean that piracy has no effect but only that the statistical analysis does not prove with sufficient reliability that there is an effect. An exception is the displacement of recent top films. The results show a displacement rate of 40 per cent which means that for every ten recent top films watched illegally, four fewer films are consumed legally" From the study

rg111 5y ago
The article also mentions that piracy did not have much effect in legal consumption of books, music, and games. People felt that prices were "fairer" in these media. Games piracy even led to people buying more games than what they would have bought without piracy. People felt that piracy in movies and TV is justified because the price is too high.
- native_samples 5y ago
  But that would clearly be wrong. Games companies have been reliably investing in DRM for 30 years and it's not because they're all idiots. Occasionally executives talk about this. Piracy rates for PC games without DRM can approach 95% and they can see in their sales curves the huge drop that occurs when a working crack is released. For a large enough game with a stable and predictable enough sales curve, it's easy to work out lost sales, because the curves start high and rapidly decay to zero in any case. That's why people outside the industry often think game copy protection doesn't work. They judge it by a standard of "it is never ever cracked" which games companies don't care about. Most sales are within the first 3 months or so. After that it dwindles and after 6 months it's become long tail; the studio has moved on unless it's an indie shop that plans to work on the same game for years. If a copy protection lasts 3-4 months it's ideal, if it lasts a year it means they put too much effort into it and could have made more money by making a faster but weaker protection. The resulting equilibrium is thus frequently mis-understood as "failure" by armchair studio executives.
danuker 5y ago
It could be that, for media other than recent top films: A) the effect is so small, that it's invisible to the study B) the study is so small, that even large effects are invisible

stutsmansoft 5y ago

No effect? My own experience differs. I had an iOS product that was doing well, and it had some DRM to prevent jailbreakers. I had a legitimate buyer complain and after soul-searching I removed the DRM. Sales immediately dropped to near zero and never recovered. So at least in my experience, piracy affected sales.

szundi 5y ago
That would mean that it was only used by jailbroken iDevices?
- viktorcode 5y ago
  Not necessarily. Jailbroken device is needed to produce decrypted dump which is packaged back into an application file. This file then can be signed with a third party service using either an enterprise account or the personal user account (in which case it must be re-signed periodically).
- Shared404 5y ago
  I could see that being the case if it was a power user focused app.
amelius 5y ago
What price was it sold for?
- Veuxdo 5y ago
  Why does it matter?
  - cgriswald 5y ago
    Does curiosity need justification? > Overall,the analysis indicates that for films and TV-series current prices are higher than 80 per cent of the illegal downloaders and streamers are willing to pay. For books, music and games prices are at a level broadly corresponding to the willingness to pay of illegal downloaders and streamers. It would be interesting to know to what degree price is a factor in app piracy.

IYasha 5y ago

It was discussed before, AFAIR. But it's one of those things people better be reminded about.

colordrops 5y ago

If it doesn't hurt sales what is the purpose to burying this?

hedgewitch 5y ago
...to push the narrative that piracy is evil and they need to take more measures against it.
- cortesoft 5y ago
  Right, but if rights holders learn that piracy doesn’t effect their bottom line, why would they care?
  - hedgewitch 5y ago
    Why do any rightsholders care about anything? Because it's about risk management and looking like they're actively protecting their IPs.
  - slothtrop 5y ago
    They still don't like that people can pirate, whether or not in impacts their bottom line. Also because they're so vigilant about protect their IP, that's kind of an extension of the behavior
  - rg111 5y ago
    They would care forbtwo reasons: 1. Their shareholders would be happy. And the CEO will get attaboys from board members. Taking a tough stance on Piracy costs a CEO nothing. Anecdotes matter little, but I have seen in many cases, when gaming companies adopted new DRMs, people actually bought their shares. And not dumb people, too. 2. There are some assholes who don't want poor people having their things. Some do it for the image purpose. Think of Apple hardware. Older models can easily be sold at a much lower price. Save some very old iPhone SEs, they don't do that. If every Tom, Dick, and Harry owns something, it dilutes a product's value to many people. People want to own rare and exotic things.

nextlevelwizard 5y ago

I am not that suprised. Piracy is mostly conducted by teens and young adults who don't have the captial to buy whatever they are pirating. After people grow up a bit and start making money they usually also pick up other hobbies (which they couldn't participate for lack of funding previously) which cuts into their pirated media consumption and on top of that now they can afford to buy said media and now with streaming platforms it is easier than ever just to pay a small monthy fee and get access to quite large pool of media (even though video streaming services are doing their best to ruin this). For me now days there aren't many reasons to pirate stuff because everything is available from streaming services, I just subscribe for a month to watch whatever movie/series I'm after. With games, most new titles are single player games which I don't care at all about and multiplayer games are either cheap or free. And Spotify handles music very well.

_fat_santa 5y ago

The solution to piracy is not taking measures to prevent it, but rather offering a product so pirating would seem like a terrible alternative. Take Spotify as a prime example. When I was a kid I pirated music like it was no ones business. I didn't really stop until Spotify came to the US and signed up. For the price of $10/month, I could listen to all the music I ever wanted. Even though at that point I had a good system for pirating music, I pretty much gave up pirating music because Spotify was just so damn good. Spotify in my eyes, rather than trying to stop music piracy, just started to compete with it.

ramadis 5y ago
I felt the same way about Netflix when it first started. Now, there are dozens of competitors with different catalogues, making piracy enticing for people once again.
- slothtrop 5y ago
  Speaking as a consumer, that in itself doesn't make it enticing. If there was very little worthwhile content on 1-2 platforms, maybe, but since I'm not the "binging" type who absolutely needs to see every hyped show right now, I can't be arsed and find there's already enough to see. Between Netflix and Prime, you're not spending that much and you sure as hell don't need a dozen subscriptions to watch every good show.
  - morelisp 5y ago
    I think there are still enough people who remember 2010-era Starz on Netflix (and with the massive DVD catalogue for the rest). Everything, on every single service, has been downhill since then.
  - toper-centage 5y ago
    I'm the same as you. I subscribe to Netflix so long as there's something I'm watching, then stop. Then I might subscribe to something else. People that complain about having to pay for all services are just power users, and I think it's fair that I don't pay as much as them.

relix 5y ago

I do wonder the effect it has on "total leisure time spend". My hypothesis is that piracy drops total spend in dollars, but maybe not necessarily on the category that was pirated. This would fit and counter the oft-claimed "if I couldn't pirate this I wouldn't have bought it anyway, so it's not a lost sale". I hypothese there would be two reasons: - because piracy enables more consumption of some media than the person otherwise would have done, it means they have less leisure time available to spend on other media which they would have spent money on. E.g. instead of buying a book and reading it, they would watch a low-value movie they pirated, affecting book sales but not movie sales - because piracy decreases the perceived value of an hour of entertainment, the person would be less willing to spend money in other categories as well and would rather fall back to cheaper options The result would be that the amount a person spends on _total_ entertainment drops, but the drop would be in other categories than the category that is piratable.

rg111 5y ago
> My hypothesis is that piracy drops total spend in dollars My hypothesis is the exact opposite. I think that piracy increases total spend in dollars. With piracy, people get to experience things for free that they otherwise wouldn't have. This opens individuals to newer media, newer niches, newer genres, and so on. I have known a few people who spent their money for the first time on video games after playing the pirated version of GTA V. They wouldn't have spent a dime on games if they hadn't played pirated GTA V. I turned into a subscriber after watching The Wire, The Sporanos, and Breaking Bad with a shared password (also a kind of piracy). I would have never even thought of paying for TV if I could not watch The Wire for free. I believe that pirated content "converts" people into web series watchers, gamers, and more. Microsoft is fully aware of Windows piracy. Had Microsoft cracked down, then they would have lost tens of millions of future paying customers. Many people pay for Office for their business because that is what they have used since their childhood- in a legal way or not.
hackerfromthefu 5y ago
Conversely, maybe the amount income people have to spend on entertainment is a function of their disposable income, so fixed by the persons financial circumstances rather than entertainment costs. i.e. if you got $20 bucks spare and a movie is $20 you watch one, if they are $10 you watch 2. Over simplified, but I think an important point, that entertainment fits into the budget of 'disposable' income rather than essential.

throwy1 5y ago

This is going to not be popular, but piracy has effect on sales. Ignore the US market for a bit, I know market in India for example has a real effect. In India piracy was rampant and it was leading to loss in sales. At one point folks used pirate movies, make them into CDs and sell them for 80 rupees each. This used to happen immediately after a movie was released. This was so widespread that these CDs were available everywhere and everyone with a CD burner would do and sell. The movie studios then adopted streaming immediately and now most movies are available very quickly after a release and so ease of availability at a higher quality made buying CDs a moot point, even for folks low on cash. It feels to me that the whole concept of DRM and freedom is mostly done from a US point of view where a dollar is nothing and people don't even pick up a dime or a quarter they find on the road.

freedomben 5y ago
I've never been to India, but I bought a decent number of pirated CDs and DVDs from people (including Indians) when I lived in Doha, Qatar in the mid 00s. They were cheap, but extremely unreliable in quality. Many of the discs simply didn't work, and of those that did, there was a good chance you were getting a "camcorder in the theatre" version complete with terrible picture, sound and people coughing. I did the math at one point and I spent more on piracy than if I'd just bought legit copies over the internet.

LoveMortuus 5y ago

“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.” -Gabe Newell

Veuxdo 5y ago
Considering that Steam games and music are still widely pirated today, I'd say this quote doesn't hold up.
- mafuy 5y ago
  Considering that Steam was a huge success, initiated a new era of gaming and is selling billions of dollars in games, I'd say it does hold up.

fsflover 5y ago

See also: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%20piracy%20study&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

dudul 5y ago

Piracy affects sales when companies try to fight it with things that make their product awful. No way I'm buying a video game that requires a constant internet connection, even to play solo. No way I'm buying a movie, book or song that can only work on a specific device via a dumb app that I need to install.