I only pirate because it is more convenient than any alternative.
The best example I experienced was when I tried to watch an apple tv original show with my cousin (who has family access to the service). He wanted to log in to his account on my laptop and needed to verify his dad’s credit card to do so. No problem, but it took a while. After that we still couldn’t watch, because the player didn’t load the video for some reason. Cue my cousin fiddling about trying to fix the issue.
In the meantime I had started to download the first two episodes and copied it on a thumb drive.
Piracy is a service problem.
For me its money problem
I can’t imagine any company every wanting to do it the way I would want. I want a single service/platform that houses all the content, that way the experience is the same. For example I don’t know if in one app I can double tap to the right to skip ahead and does it work on the other apps as well? probably not.
In theory that’s what we had in the VHS days. But I hear you. Piracy today is a superior product in almost any scenario.
Valve is a terrible company and Steam is an awful platform but their stance on piracy is why they deserve a lot of the success they get. In a day and age where everyone was trying as hard as possible to punish their userbase as much as possible for their crappy distribution model, here came a company that actually understood why people pirate in the first place and made a vast majority of the gaming population willingly download DRM then go through it to spend billions on games they will never play.
Lol the valve fanboys found this, yikes. They downvote bombed this like a game which slightly annoyed them.
Care to explain why “Valve is a terrible company” and “Steam is an awful platform”? Surely, it has tons of porn games (that you can hide), or shitty games (that is hard to sort through), or CS:GO item gambling problems (don’t really care). But I kind of fail to see how the company or the client could be fundamentally bad.
The 30% cut Steam takes is quite a bit. Considering the near-monopoly it has on game distribution, that could easily mean the difference between turning a profit and not for an indie developer.
Personally their efforts towards things I support (PC handhelds, Linux gaming) and the convenience of the platform outweigh the things I dislike, but being frustrated by its problems is understandable when people don’t really have another choice.
Yes, I agree that 30% is a lot. But let’s look from another perspective: If a developer, for ease of calculation, sells a game for 30$ on Steam, he receives 20$. If he sells it on a competitive platform with 5% cut (that’s 6x less than Steam) he gets 27$.
However, Steam is way bigger, and if a developer can sell the same game more times on Steam (33% more times to be exact), he breaks even.
More people to buy = more people to play = bigger player base => more people buy it. It is a poaitive feedback loop.
I am not arguing that 30% is good, all I am saying is I understand that Steam has to take a big cut to pay for the features it provides for “free” alongside the usual game content (cloud saves, community, workshop, utems, etc.).
Do you think any indie developer has the means to achieve a lower cost to distribution and promotion if they try to sell and support the game themselves?
Valve solves many problems for developers and these problems aren’t imaginary and free to resolve.
Not saying 30% is justified for all games, but if you want a quality title it’s going to cost more than just development. Since the Unity debacle we’ve seen some developers even say openly that costs of promotion and support dwarf costs of development.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9aCwCKgkLo
And here are some reason I personally don’t like them:
- They routinely profit off of crime which they allow on their platforms
- Rampant white supremacy goes completely unchallenged
- Fuck all quality control
- They did NFTs before it was cool
- Will not remove hateful media off their platform unless legally forced to
- Countless of their games have ties to real life neo-nazi movements (TF2 is especially bad for this)
- Their CEO was active on 4chan when they started the company
- Predatory FOMO sales tactics which has people buying games they don’t even play
- EVERYTHING about the steam marketplace
- This point was brought up in the video, but extreme institutional racism within the company which bleeds into their games/communities
To sum it up: about the same as any platform where people can interact? What’s so FOMO about a game being on sale if it’s gonna be on sale next week aswell?
I fail to see how Steam Market is so bad, it is not possible to redeem the cash (unless you do it via black market, which is against the TOS), so all money is still in the system. Yeah, it is being used to do unregulated gambling, but it’s a regulatory problem which should be handled by the countries to define what gambling is, and shut these sites down. Why the fuck should Steam care?
NFTs in crypto space are a joke, and everywhere else they are basically in any online software, failing to see the point here.
Their CEO was active on 4chan when they started the company
This one made me giggle. Who are you, the moral internet police?
Glory to Valve for investing in Proton.
Really telling on yourself with that one.
It’s always fascinated me that companies who understand their core value proposition of their business can be so fucked up in so many other ways and still succeed.
It’s like fighting games. You can have a solid bread&butter and do well, even if you’re completely trash at the rest of the game.
It’s like leasing warehouses to store all our treasures.
These days pirates do not use islands to bury treasures.
They never did
I did when I was 6. It was a plastic bag full of bark. I buried it in the school playground sand box one day, and came back for it a week later.
I found it, along with some cat poop. Overall 9/10 experience, would recommend.
idk, a debrid service is so cheap, it costs less to pay than to buy the hard drives and server + power. And it has pretty much everything already, so it’s more convenient, too.
It’s hard to justify dropping a pile of cash on 3 drives for a RAID when it will take about a decade to pay for itself vs. debrid, by which point I’ll need to replace the drives. Plus, it takes more time to set up, maintain, and load the desired media.
I’ve found that for single person purposes, a RAID array is unnecessary. I just buy beefy 8TB drives. If it dies, just download any recent torrents again or pull a backup
Isn’t that just asking for trouble? From the Real-Debrid TOS:
The User acknowledges not to use our service to download copyright infringement digital files punishable by a suspension of his account and reporting to competent organizations and authorities
Logging policy is not great:
Files links that Users download are stored in a database for legal concerns and our internal use. All saved links are erased within 1 month for security reasons and service needs. However all requests made on our site are stored for 1 year, the legal retention period.
Doesn’t look like you can sign up anonymously (unless you consider bitcoin and email anonymous, which they’re generally not).
How long until they get raided?
I suppose it depends on your jurisdiction. Uploading is what’s (potentially) illegal in Canada. Downloading is (probably) legal.
And neither have been tried by courts because mass John Doe suits have been shut down by our courts.
Regardless, the legal risk of downloading here is basically zero, so there’s effectively no risk to using a debrid service.
Yeah sorry the point of piracy is to be a cheapskate. If I’m gonna spend money might as well buy the damn thing.
Its absolutely not the point XD
For some it is. It used to be a point for me. It still is a factor, but it is no longer the main point. Service and convenience is the most prevalent point for me right now.
What it comes down to for me is that I don’t want to subsribe to and pay for 7 streaming services to be able to watch everything I want. I had gotten used to Netflix being the primary streaming service which offered “everything” (it didn’t but it was plenty). I stopped being a pirate in that time. Then every asshole company pulled their shit from netflix and started their own streaming service. That’s when the convenience stopped and I went back to priacy. Funny how that works, right?
pirates. pussies
