this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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I generally agree with him, but there are a lot of people who pirate simply because they don’t want to pay. And I’m not casting moral judgment here, i just feel like it bears mentioning lol “almost always” is pretty generous
No it also means it's a service problem in the sense that it's not priced right for a geography. Pricing a game $70 where local average monthly income is $120 a month is a service problem. If you expect people from that geographic region to pay, the product should be priced within their means. And thus argument is valid only for digital goods where every new copy of the said goods costs mere few cents.
You’re gonna have to put in some work to convince me he used “service“ to also say “too expensive” when he said that. Hell GAAS as a concept didn’t even exist when he said that.
Lets compare three options as example:
One streaming service with everything:
Piracy:
Current streaming services:
People choose whether to pay monetary or opportunity costs. For a broke student priacy might still be the way to go, because they have time but not money. For most people a convenient streaming service will be the way to go though, because not having to worry about everything around and just finding your movie/series in 30 seconds, after you put dinner in the plates is the preferred option.
The current situation combines high monetary costs with high opportunity costs, so that piracy becomes attractive to many people, who would be happy to pay for a streaming service, that actually covers everything.
So i think "almost always" is perfectly applicable. Also keep in mind, that the offer of pirated stuff is directly related to the demand. if the demand reduces, so will the offer, which in this case would make piracy even less convenient. Of course the pricing matters, and if the one streaming service would cost say 50 €/month, more people would pirate again. But the dominant factor first is the service quality.
He made that statement when streaming barely existed. People were still primarily buying DVDs. That was the late 2000’s when it was only Netflix, maybe Hulu was just starting, and game streaming was barely a concept.
For gaming, you've got Steam, which is pretty close to the ideal legit content delivery service. You don't even necessarily have to pirate in order to demo games if you're comfortable paying up front and making a decision within 2 hours.
Nothing similar exists or has existed for TV/Movies. Netflix was pretty good for a while, but you've never had the option to download the content to your own hard drive. Now you're not even allowed to log in to your account on as many devices as you want.
Give me a service that's a free storefront where I can pay a one-time fee for content that I'm actually interested in and download it to my hard drive as many times in as many places as I care to. Bonus points if I can stream to other devices that I'm logged in to and lend my purchases to my friends & family like I can with Steam. I don't care if there's DRM in the form of me having to log in to actually use the content if I can use it the way I want.
There is no way they could possibly know the percentage of Pirates to do that. Just because it occurs doesn’t mean there aren’t countless people who do it for free things. It’s also important to remember that those claims come from advocates, so you need to take it with a ton of caveats/pinches of salt. They have a pretty strong incentive to make that case.
What? There is no information. You made a broad assertion. You don’t have a single source for that claim.
I don’t need to prove that people download free media because it’s free because it’s literally the reason for it. The motivations may change but the entire appeal of piracy is that it’s free. It’s why Napster was created.
If that's true on its face, then you're not losing any money either way since they are never going to pay regardless even if you try to force them to.
Meanwhile, you can absolutely scare away what could have been a paying customer by offering dogshit service.
That’s never been an assumption you can make.
If you hand me a $10 version of a thing or a $5 option of the exact same thing, I’m taking the $5. Free is no different. Especially when they can do it from the comfort of their home and not drive to a mall to buy the CD or whatever. Remember what year it was when this all started man.
1903 when Edison v. Lubin was filed?
If you’re going to be a smartass then I have no desire to continue this conversation. I am talking about when piracy became mainstream via napster because it became easy for people to get free music.
People who pirate because they don't want to pay will never, ever pay. Not worth considering them to be honest.