“Piracy is not a pricing issue,” Gabe Newell, the co-founder of Valve, the company behind the world’s largest PC gaming platform, Steam, observed in 2011. “It’s a service issue.” Today, the crisis in streaming makes this clearer than ever. With titles scattered, prices on the rise, and bitrates throttled depending on your browser, it is little wonder some viewers are raising the jolly roger again. Studios carve out fiefdoms, build walls and levy tolls for those who wish to visit. The result is artificial scarcity in a digital world that promised abundance.

This hits the nail on the head...

I wonder if these greedy fuckers know this but don't give a shit in favor of short term profits,or if they're actually so dense and holed up in their own world disconnected from reality that they don't see it?

[–] deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz 49 points 1 month ago (2 children)

They know it, but refuse to belive it, because they've built an empire on a faulty premise and can't conceive that they may be wrong.

Source: two decades in the industry. But I got ~~better~~ out.

[–] MudMan@fedia.io 28 points 1 month ago

I don't know that I'd say they refuse to believe it, it's more that there are short term goals and milestones to hit because literally every single industry is held to the standards and timelines of speculative investors rather than actual investors.

Everybody understands you should be servicing your audience and keeping them happy, and everybody is happy with you doing that... as long as it's within the constraints of hitting quarterly goals. In a world where content routinely takes 3-5 years to make that is not a great fit.

Newell doesn't have any investors to answer to so he gets to say those things when he's in billionaire club. Everybody else just goes "no shit, Gabe" and keeps working on squeezing something out to keep pretending to have done better year on year.

It's a remarkable example of the aggregation of incentives going against every single individual person involved, including those setting the incentives.

[–] onslaught545@lemmy.zip 12 points 1 month ago

The problem is mostly that the C-suite is only capable of thinking a quarter at a time, which is a side effect of the desire for perpetual growth.

It doesn't matter if a policy can net them huge profits in a year if it makes this quarter look worse than last quarter.

[–] Banzai51@midwest.social 12 points 1 month ago

They don't care. They know they'll lose subscribers but they'll make more money overall on the suckers that stick out the monopoly pricing. Same thing is happening in the auto industry where they sell less cars but are more profitable.

[–] ushmel@piefed.world 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

99% of the general public will not pirate anything because they lack the ability to do so. Of the 1% left, 99% of them use public trackers with variable results regarding quality and shady website shenanigans. The most common form of piracy going forward will probably be like those hacked fire sticks that would stream pirated content, because it's easy and low barrier, like the hacked cable box cards/chips from the 90s.

[–] freebee@sh.itjust.works 15 points 1 month ago (1 children)

If you count using shady free streaming websites, I think the number is waaaay bigger than 1%

[–] ushmel@piefed.world 5 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I don't even think most people own a PC at this point, just tablets and phones.

[–] ThoGot@feddit.org 9 points 1 month ago

You don't need a PC to use a shady streaming website though

[–] onslaught545@lemmy.zip 8 points 1 month ago

Then there's me running multiple servers from my home.

[–] gruhuken@slrpnk.net 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You think people don't have laptops? Everyone I know does. 22 yo

[–] ushmel@piefed.world 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

What's the average socioeconomic status of your friend group? Most people have tablets now because they can "get them free" from the phone company.

[–] gruhuken@slrpnk.net 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Minimum wage, early to mid 20s. Many are graduated or dropped out students TBF so needed a laptop but the others who never went to uni still have one, mainly to play Sims/Stardew Valley, watch movies on dodgy websites, or write fiction on

[–] ook@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 1 month ago

In 2011. It's been 14 years and for streaming portal things just got worse and worse.

[–] MudMan@fedia.io 27 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The problem is that all the competitors are enshittifying the same way at the same pace. If there was a holdout in a position to grow their platform we may at least go back to the days of "Netflix is all you need".

As it is, it makes more sense to go back to physical media purchases, and I blame absolutely nobody if their disposable income and lack of box fetishes makes them think downloading the content is perfectly equivalent. The Plex server where I store all my physical media backups is by far the best streaming library I have access to, at least if you discount novelty as a factor.

[–] blackbrook@mander.xyz 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You don't need physical media. You can buy and download flac files. It's the ownable asset part that is important, not the physical part.

[–] MudMan@fedia.io 3 points 1 month ago

This is true. The thing is, all data needs a medium.

It doesn't matter if you own a file sitting in a hard drive or a disc sitting in a box. Discs are nicer because you get a thing you can put on a shelf to act as a backup of the file you dump from it. Plus they often come with nice extras. If you don't think things on shelves are nice your priorities may be different.

[–] deadcatbounce@reddthat.com 20 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It's not just a pricing issue. It's an ownership issue.

Too many of the things we buy are not ours.

Yesterday I saw the article about VW cars which need a subscription to use the built-in capabilities. The car you bought doesn't belong to you.

[–] cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone 9 points 1 month ago

i would happily buy dvd sets if i could but the geniuses decided they didn't want to let me buy them so here i am

[–] HubertManne@piefed.social 13 points 1 month ago (1 children)

These articles are great but I believe there are also people like me. Folks who don't pay for any streaming services and don't pirate. So if somehow they stamped out piracy folks like me won't be coming back and I think many of the pirates would still opt out which would lead to basically the shows becoming even more irrelevant as much of the talk around a show and reviews and such are from pirates.

[–] Sc00ter@lemmy.zip 8 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Like the article says, im someone whos been out of the game for a while, but definitely interested in how this has been going

One commonly used app is legal but can, through community add-ons, channel illicit streams.

Anyone care to enlighten me? DM is fine if youd prefer

[–] Bongles@lemmy.zip 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I don't know, but i use stremio plus real debrid. I had to grab the torrentio add on to do it so it kind of fits the bill.

[–] stevedice@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

This.

Side note: I find it hilarious that we're paying for piracy. Gabe was right, it's a service issue.

[–] kolorafa@szmer.info 1 points 6 days ago

Correct, It is not a price issue, for me (Linux user) I can pay for legal site and watch in shitty quality, or pay for "alternative" distributors which not only have better quality but also have more content.

And I pay for multiple more-or-less shady services, so in turn I pay more than some of my friends that use only one service and periodically switch to another.

I want a service that "just work", not shitty ones that I need to look for the content I want to watch on multiple services and even then get idiotic region locked or ass quality.

[–] Flatfire@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 month ago

"Community Add-ons" leads me to think this is probably Kodi. You can generally do IPTV streaming through it, or torrent streaming even.

[–] sunzu2@thebrainbin.org 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I know daddy Gabe said it is a service issue which is a fair point

But I am beyond that point. Hollywood and music industry are full of pedophiles. They regime whore for the owner class and shill propaganda to plebs to accept their deteriorating conditions.

These people are the enemy and this is the class war.

Don't be a dummy, don't fund your oppressor.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 month ago

At least when it comes to the Movie industry, piracy is pretty much a moral obligation.

Ditto for the Music Industry.

Ditto for the Science Publishing Industry.

It's only not the same for the Games Industry because so much of it are Indies.