I really don't understand why everyone doesn't just offer all the movies all the time. These availability windows on shit is ridiculous. You wonder how pirates stay in business, it's because of availability windows and that region-locked bullshit.

The Wolf of Wall Street came out like 10 years ago, and you're telling me the only way to watch it is to buy it for $15 on Amazon? Keep dreaming.

It's about price discrimination. The first thing is finding out exactly how bad their customer wants the movie, so that's why there's availability windows, to see how a given customer's behavior changes based on availability of the product and substitutes. With that they can then maximize profit and charge $15, or $14, or $16, or whatever the exact maximum you're willing to pay for it is. And that's also why it's frustrating: your frustration is literally what they are trying to gage and measure and maximize.

> I really don't understand why everyone doesn't just offer all the movies all the time.

I don't have an expert answer, but I'll bet the answer has "copyright holders" in it somewhere.

Sure, but why wouldn't they get paid based on streams of their copyrighted materials, or some other payment scheme? I mean, hey, it was good enough for video stores in the 90's, right? The equivalent of* Wolf of Wall Street sat on the shelf in Blockbuster for 15 years after it came out. They didn't have to hide it in the back because of an availability window.

The "availability window" is manufactured scarcity. Those tapes were physical objects that they couldn't recall once they left the building, but with digital goods they can decide how much of which title to make available in order to manipulate the demand curve.

That's the logic for high-demand titles. The reasoning for not making all the junk available at a fixed cost is the flip side: if users had a giant library of good-but-not-hit content, they'd be less likely to chase around their HBO or Netflix or whatever licenses.

The copyright holder isn't trying to make it scarce. The studio/distributor would really love it if NetFlix extended the licensing contract window instead of letting it expire. But, NetFlix will only pay to extend its availability if the content is attracting people to its platform and that's becoming less likely and necessary as NetFlix builds its own content that will remain on the platform forever.

Basically, we're going to end up with a streaming platform from every studio/distributor where you'll pay them directly instead of paying the broadcaster since the internet has made it so easy for studios and distributors to become "broadcasters" too. What seemed like a good thing at first is actually going to be worse in the end for consumers. We're going to be paying the same as before for each movie purchase/rental and then even more than before to license each show we want to watch.

Or, if we're lucky, we wind up with a "Spotify for Movies" that pays rights holders based on how much/frequently their content is watched. I'm certain we'll get there eventually, but it may take another decade.

You don't want that. The end result is a system that looks a lot like youtube where bots rule the platform and the numbers are constantly gamed.

Well, part of that is that the price went down. When video stores were in their heyday, they often paid 5-6 times more for each tape in order to have public playback rights. The studios realized that they would make more money selling copies to individuals, but after that changed, the big rental chains changed to models where they paid the studios per-rental.

You don't need any special rights to rent out physical copies of movies. Video stores, Netflix, Redbox all could just buy disks and tapes from the local market and rent them out directly. Sure, they can make a business deal to get better pricing and cut out the middleman, but this effectively puts a cap on that negotiation because the local market is always a fallback. When streaming deals fail there is no fallback, see Netflix's depleting catalog.

The problem is that the experience of watching a movie at home only shifted a little bit during the transition from physical to streaming, while the legal and licensing framework between the two are so different they are hardly comparable. Copyright holders took great advantage of the change to a new format allowing them to redefine the meaning of licensing so that they have more control and can extract more value.

Here's a story about Redbox employees buying DVDs from Walmart to stock kiosks.

https://www.businessinsider.com/redbox-employee-buys-100-dvd...

It seems like a wink-wink, hush-hush deal struck between Redbox employees and certain Walmart brick and mortar employees. I would venture as far as assuming that the three-copy-per-person limit was am arbitrary decision by another brick and mortar employee -- policies like these usually come from subjective decisions by well-meaning but uninformed managers in the retail world.

There's a similar scenario where the last Blockbuster Video in Bend, Oregon restocks its DVDs by buying at Walmart, but it's detailed in one of the documentary videos about it that the manager of said Blcokbuster has a special off-the-record arrangement with Walmart management.

I only mentioned it as a signal that Redbox was apparently unable to get a better deal with whoever licenses/sells the DVDs wholesale than from Walmart, even if they got a special deal from those particular Walmart stores.

I don't know about the US, but here in France they do need special rights.

From what I understand, the first sale doctrine protects them in the US

That is true, and established now, but in the early days of VHS rental, it wasn't so clearly established, and the movie studios did issue high-cost tapes that came with public performance rights.

Even now, any film display outside of the home still requires a public performance license, the studios have just decided to put their efforts into enforcement on the location and business side, rather than the supply/sales side.

>...That is true, and established now, but in the early days of VHS rental, it wasn't so clearly established, and the movie studios did issue high-cost tapes that came with public performance rights.

I don't think that is right. The first sale right is a limitation of the copyright holder's distribution right. This right was first recognized by the Supreme Court in 1908 and was clearly established by the time of video rentals. Video tapes were initially priced very high as the studios were selling to the rental stores, but eventually the studios simply found they could make more money selling copies to individuals and the prices came down.

I did have an expert answer, and tried to find it in my comments history on my mobile. But couldn't... alas, the gist is yes. Copyright holders and television channels and networks.

There is absolutely no incentive for a copyright holder to release their material on a global scale on a single platform for a comission or similar where one can sell dozens, if not hundreds, of times same material (sell, not comission) for a period of time and renew the contract every three years or so. In order to do that, tv stations wont touch material that everyone has accesss to, because people will opt to watch maybe there and then because of that advertisers will then opt out... It's a complicated circle.

I think this comes from ossified committees making decisions. The concept of a world divided into "regions" is still strong in some people's minds, even though it stopped making any sense within the last two or three decades.

This idea of "regions" is infuriating if you happen to live in a non-first-class "region", meaning anything that is not the United States. Often you will be denied purchase, which is ridiculous in the context of discussions about "piracy".

Spotify has shown the right way to do it: just offer the stuff in a way that is convenient and let people pay for it. Their growth numbers speak for themselves.

> Spotify has shown the right way to do it: just offer the stuff in a way that is convenient and let people pay for it.

I don't think Spotify are a great example really. They're almost a 14 year old company, and last wuartet was the first time they were profitable. They've already stated they're expecting a loss this year. Is it sustainable?

I would also expect that we'll see a rift a la Netflix, over time we'll see different companies start to hold exclusives to their own streaming platform.

I'm not speaking of dvds specifically, but products in general including books, medicine, etc.

they still 'need' regions because they generally charge US customers more. more often then not, US has to pay cost + IP costs + margin, where as people in say India pay cost + margin.

I think this remains true for dvd/movies. Think about it, I heard the cost of a movie ticket for a hollywood movie is about 1$ in pakistan.

I'm in favor of getting rid of regions, and outlawing the practice of making mostly US consumers pay the bill for IP costs illegal, but until that happens they 'need' regions. how else are they going to charge people in china 2$ and people in the US 20$.

> "Seriously though. Almost every modern country outside the US is charged more for less."

so you mean only europe. but data disagrees with what you said: https://www.businessinsider.com/countries-where-netflix-is-m...

so unkindly, fuck off.

> This idea of "regions" is infuriating > Spotify has shown the right way to do it

Sorry but no. Spotify is not available anywhere but in a few selected regions.

Regions make complete sense if people in certain countries are making a few hundred dollars a month. Suddenly that $20 movie is over 5% of their monthly income.

And I can rent it (in SD) for $0.33 in India. Meanwhile, the only movie I have had a desire to watch in the last couple of months and I was willing to pay through the nose for, I couldn't, because its digital distribution was region locked.

Which movie? Just interested :)

I was really pissed off because I had forgotten what the movie even was. Luckily a reference to it popped up in my RSS feeds. I'm pretty sure it was https://www.hailsatanfilm.com/ this. Now it seems that Magnolia Pictures has picked it up and put it in theaters, but when I first heard of it there was no scheduled release.

Agreed. I would have no problem paying $100/month for a platform that let me stream any movie and tv show I wanted. Hell, give me packages instead (such as Disney content or Fox). The worst they can do is require 5 different accounts across 5 different services that all provide random content with overlap between services. Do you think folks would be fine with paying for 3 different cable boxes and subscriptions? No of course not, and the same applies here.

Yup. This balkanization of streaming is really dumb and I believe it will cause resurgency of piracy in the coming years. As a customer, I only want one thing: a hole I can drop money into at regular intervals, and get arbitrary movies and TV shows from it on demand. I don't care about brands, "originals", and other shenanigans - each of them is one more argument towards installing a torrent client again.

Copyright holders either get paid a few sheckles per view with an unknown number of viewers, or a big lump sum wad of cash for an exclusive unlimited contract.

Exclusivity contracts can benefit the copyright holder in the former model by locking customers into a higher sheckle perview deal, or in the later model it can be used by the provider to gain customers.

Really though, when the Grinch Cartoon is only available on Comcast during Christmas you just pirate it for the first time in 10 years.

Or worse, the only way to watch it _is with a cable subscription_. What??? Spiderman Homecoming on Amazon straight up cannot be rented without signing up for a Starz subscription.

It's completely baffling. Amazon really dropped their 'customer obsession' on the video side.

Do you really think they have permission to rent it and choose not to? Starz uses Amazon for their HBO Go/Now equivalent, it's probably the only way Amazon can offer it for rent at all.

Amazon didn’t decide not to rent it. It’s up to the rightsholder.

But it is crazy that it is available for rent on iTunes but not Prime.

Because they don't care about providing valuable services for the benefit of the customer. They're a monopoly that can easily get away with minimum effort and then price it as high as the market will bear.

From my perspective everyone, especially the service providers, are completely missing the problem. Its portability between platforms and user friction.

In the era of VHS-DVD-BluRay one could buy movies, and they play in any player. When I get a new player, it just works.

Now, we need to juggle accounts, billing, subscriptions, and player authorizations. Having a FireTV and Roku plugged into each TV is an absolute pain in the ass.

What needs to happen is the establishment of a standard protocol for providing content and authorization. Each layer of the problem needs to be abstracted and compartmentalized. The Apple App world destroyed the server-client relationship.

First there needs to be a standard protocol for a service provider to deliver content after receiving authorization.

Next there needs to be a standard aggregation protocol. This is the step everyone misses. The best analogy I can think of is the Google Reader to Feedly-Innoreader relationship. I could set up Google Reader with my config, and then sign into ANY other compatible front end that supported Google Reader and use their product without setting it up from scratch. I want a place that combines MoviesAnywhere with billing management. One place to go to subscribe and cancel subscriptions. This place might just be an API with no client front end, the actual interfacing with the service could be handed off to the clients. People might reply Roku or Apple, but they still miss the point that if I set up a Roku, my config isnt portable to Fire or Apple or Google. I can access my same Gmail and Amazon account from Firefox and Chrome without rebuilding my profiles and losing my config. HTTP/HTML is what makes the Web Server/Web Browser relationship so beautiful, anyone can implement it.

Finally there needs to be an open way for anyone to write a client that connects to the aggregation services. Consumers should be able to have a Roku in one room and a FireTV in another, and an LG in another.

As long as each client vendor tries to suck people into their ecosystem, and as long as each service provider wants to handle subscriptions and billing themselves (or the client apps trying to take it over so Amazon/Apple/Roku manage my billing) people will continue to find the friction and lack of portability to be too big a pain in the ass. It sucks to have to commit to being an Apple or Google or Amazon or Roku house. It sucks that each service provider has to write a client side app for Apple, Google, Amazon, and Roku and that upstart services sometimes can only support some of them.

As long as Layers 1-3 are combined into 2 frankenlayers, consumers will continue to grow more frustrated as more services pop up, and become more trapped in ecosystems.

Layer 1: Video Provider - CBS, Netflix, Disney

Layer 2: Subscription Manager - ???

Layer 3: Media Player - anything the consumer wants, never trapped

Piracy Solves this problem.

Layer 1: Video Provider - Usenet, Torrents

Layer 2: Subscription Manager - Plex, Emby, DLNA, media servers

Layer 3: Media Player - Kodi, or any competitor.

Just like how I can sign into the same gmail account from any client, I pray for the day I can walk up to a media center, sign in, and load my lifelong profile, without needing the media player to be proprietary-compatible with each and every service provider, and without needing to sign into 20 services to see what's playing. Going to a friend's house and only seeing what they are signed into is infinitely more inconvenient that carrying a DVD to their house. And these companies wonder why password sharing is such a problem? It's cuz if I want to watch my shows I have to sign into my account on their device under their Amazon or Roku profile, and now that login is cached. At least Cable/sattelite worked in every room of a house, you add an HBO subscription and boom every box is instantly updated.

That's the solution, but the problem is that video providers are too dumb[0] to agree on Layer 2. Each of them wants to own the subscription management platform[1] for themselves. So instead of one service that would divvy up your money between relevant parties and let you watch whatever you want, we get balkanization of streaming space, with payment management pushed onto users. You won't have a Layer 2 protocol in this mess simply because none of the players want it.

--

[0] - Yes, I'm fully aware that they're following their economical incentives. But at some point we really should start calling out falling into short-term profit-maximizing traps like these as being dumb. And/or antisocial.

[1] - This is foretold by calling streaming services "platforms". As our industry proves time and again, whenever there's a need for a platform, everyone and their dog will develop one, hoping to become the winner that takes it all - in the process ruining the whole space for all users with their vendor lock-in bullshit.

Ideally yes. Practically I think consumers will be happy to choose between 1-3 providers. Think about it, up until now we were paying cable companies the price of all the 'all you can stream' services combined. Except in regions where selection is just not immediately available piracy will continue.

And now the cable companies own the content (Comcast/NBC Universal, ATT/DirecTV/WarnerTurnerHBO)

The cable companies are not an independent Layer 2 anymore.

There's always ebay or Netflix disc by mail.

If this is what you want just sign up for Netflix’s dvd service. Problem solved.

>Pirating games has never been as unattractive as it has been today due to Steam's monopoly and ubiquity.

This is a cop out to me. I have never been a fan of DRM for this reason, because it requires an unassailable monopoly for customers not to notice that it's a problem. I am probably in the minority because I've never been happy with Steam's service because of this, but as long as they are the 800 pound gorilla in the room then they obviously never will listen to any of my complaints.

If you take this line of thinking to movies, it leads to dangerous ideas like "everyone but my favorite streaming service should just close down" which is totally ridiculous, but still when I talk to friends about this issue they are quick to propose that as the solution! It really makes me try to avoid contact with the digital publishing industry as much as possible. What we see now is the movie studios' response to that which is:

- To increase the size of the data dramatically (4K+ video) so that casual sharing requires hardware investment and thus remains difficult

- To make things highly dependent on a very specialized backend to work correctly (Netflix's recent experiment with branching narratives)

- To start bundling it with other things (Amazon Prime)

- To offer streaming analytics as a better data platform than the traditional Nielsen ratings

- And probably more I can't think of right now

The thing is that these are all real value adds which I am glad to see them competing on. Right now all the downstream vendors are forced to invest in rolling their own DRM. I would rather see copyright holders offering a system where a proof of purchase can be transferred between services, but they would need to band together to actually do it and start putting that into their contracts. Can you imagine if we had that instead of DRM?

> If you take this line of thinking to movies, it leads to dangerous ideas like "everyone but my favorite streaming service should just close down" which is totally ridiculous, but still when I talk to friends about this issue they are quick to propose that as the solution!

Honestly, this is the solution I'd like. Because I don't care about who is serving the movies, I want the movies. All of them in one place.

There's probably some law in economics that amounts to this, but it seems to me that competition is only useful if the goods/services being sold are commodities. Movies, or games, are an extreme example of non-substitutable goods, so as long as providers can get exclusive rights to sell/license them only on their platforms, competition becomes against customer interest, and monopoly is a better option. People are rational to observe that they gain nothing by Origin existing next to Steam, just like they don't gain anything by Netflix existing next to HBO and Amazon.

That is exactly the problem I was addressing, which is that the reason monopoly looks good is because the current systems we're looking are so entrenched and require DRM, which is a tool that actively and deliberately prevents platforms from innovating. Following this, it's no surprise that Netflix and Amazon are turning to making their own films, and that Origin only exists because Steam's monopoly means that EA couldn't negotiate acceptable licensing terms with Valve. Get rid of the DRM and there is plenty of reason to compete in ways that help customers. Then give them a way to easily transfer ownership between supporting platforms and everybody wins.

There is a solution for purchased movies - Movies Anywhere. You can sync purchases between iTunes, Amazon Prime, Google Play Movies and Vudu.

Four of the six studios are in. Blame the other two studios.

Steam is not DRM though and they offer lots of DRM free games too[0]

https://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_Big_List_of_DRM-Free_Games...

The issue I have is not that the vendor (Steam, Netflix, etc) is imposing DRM, but that the copyright holders demand it, and that there are cases where the vendor gives into these demands. You're right that Steam doesn't do this in all cases, but in some they do.

Epic game store is paying a lot for exclusives to compete with steam. We should see a jump in games piracy.

Absolutely. Every major game forum I read appears to have an abundance of such sentiment.

Timed exclusives on a store that many people outright _hate_ is going to increase piracy, without a doubt.

This is not the same as Netflix and competitors. No one is stopping a steam user from buying from epic store since its an one off purchase , but to watch an amazon exclusive you need an additional subscription.

Except that the store itself is a deterrent, for a whole laundry list of reasons you can seek elsewhere.

For me, the deal breakers are:

1. No user reviews.

2. Refund system is allegedly horrible and unreliable.

3. No cloud saves.

4. No mod workshop.

5. No forums.

6. No store-provided, NAT-punching, low latency networking.

The last three have made for many of my best gaming experiences in recent years

For me, one issue is the forty-something percent stake tencent has. Both in that I don't trust their software and that I have serious ethical concerns about directly supporting china. I know it's essentially impossible to not buy anything from them, but I would say videogames are definitely something people can easily stop buying.

That's just a matter of competition catching up though. From a consumer perspective multiple stores should have a positive effect. On the other hand streaming services are not benefiting the consumer directly.

Those things cost money. It's where a good chunk of Valve's cut goes.

Store closes shop. Your "purchases" turn out to be for a game licence that only works if the shop servers are up.

I've been burnt by this, most commonly with multiplayer games that only work with bankrupt company's server.

You also can't buy a game for a friend.

The Epic Launcher was recently caught datamining everything from running processes to root certificates. I would never install it personally. It wouldn't make me pirate either, games are easy to boycott, I did the same with EA and Ubisoft when they went rotten, havent looked back, even convinced some friends not to buy from EA and Ubi :)

>The Epic Launcher was recently caught datamining everything from running processes to root certificates

seems to have originated from here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/PhoenixPoint/comments/b0rxdq/epic_g...

and is alarmist at best. see: https://www.reddit.com/r/PhoenixPoint/comments/b0rxdq/epic_g...

I really don't understand the sentiment since having 2-3 game launchers has been the norm for digital games for years now. I can't buy any new Blizzard/Activision games or EA games through Steam that I know of, and these are some of the largest game companies and largest releases in the world.

PC Gaming has really only accepted two major launchers: Steam and Blizzard. Blizzard's launcher is only majorly accepted in my group of friends as it's the only way for some of them to get their WoW fix.

Origin is actively avoided (to the point of avoiding EA's games completely), Ubisoft's Uplay will work with Steam, and Bethesda's launcher was immediately uninstalled after the debacle which was Fallout 76.

None of my friends (that will admit it, anyway) have the Epic launcher installed. They are all frustrated that games they're excited about ("The Outer Worlds" and "Borderlands 3") are timed exclusives on Epic's launcher.

Some of them are very hung up on the fact that Tencent owns a major stake in Epic Games (between 40%-50%). They have seen how China deals with games (WoW in China is the biggest one, game consoles not being legal in the county until recently) and the Internet (Great Firewall of China) and are in no way interested in allowing their software on the machine. Further, it has been observed that the Epic Launcher performs behaviors that behaviors they consider shady[1].

Personally, I won't play any games that are Epic Store exclusives. Not because I have any particular anger toward Epic (I've loved Unreal Tournament for a long time), but because I already have a large backlog of games on Steam, I'd like to keep everything in a single launcher, and by the time I have my backlog cleared, these games should be on Steam and a GOTY version will be out that has all of the DLC included, or if they're not, something else that I care about more will likely have come along.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/PhoenixPoint/comments/b0rxdq/epic_g...

> Further, it has been observed that the Epic Launcher performs behaviors that behaviors they consider shady[1].

you mean behaviors entirely consistent with a browser process? https://www.reddit.com/r/PhoenixPoint/comments/b0rxdq/epic_g...

As we all know, everyone loves browser tracking and nobody ever uses that data in a shady way.

I'm all against tracking, but the whole post was framed as "epic launcher is doing [scary techno-sounding stuff]", when really it's "epic game launcher is using a webview".

There's no need for them to use a webview - launching a game, purchasing a game, and installing a game do not inherently need a webview. See the last thirty years of gaming history for examples that show this.

Yes, it's a webview. Yes, it's also making requests that are not transparent to the user. Yes, it's a bad thing and it is an issue no matter how many times apologists try to downplay it.

>There's no need for them to use a webview

alll the major ones use some sort of a webview. uplay and origin are essentially electron apps (js + chromium wrapper). steam uses a webview for its community/store page.

All that the rabblerousing gamer anger amounts to is that you and your friends have not yet had the new store successfully marketed to you. The companies involved have fixed their PR before, they'll do it again. Give it a few years.

I'm another person completely different than the OP the only two installers I'll allow on my machine are Steam and GOG. Why? Because Origin was garbage and EA is a terrible company to support. Ubisoft will not compel new to install a game. Rockstar and their stupid ass community requirements even in single player games have made be never want to play another Rockstar game and wishing I could get a refund on games that backported this to. Steam and GOG worked hard for user trust and built it over years, not by what games they have not but how they've constantly tried to listen to users. You can tell that the people running these companies are games themselves and probably use the same launchers. I can promise you there are people at EA who have never played a video game intentionally in their lives. It's a shame too as there are some really good games in their stables.

Blizzard and Origin are reasonably good stores and launchers, and their exclusives are that of the publisher who runs the store.

Epic Store is... Not a quality experience and its exclusives are not solely from the publisher that runs the store.

Origin was also “not a quality experience” when it first came out, and it was also universally hated by fans of Steam.

So why do you think Epic can’t do the same thing?

Steam itself was not very well received at first. Always online, resource hog, slow, buggy... They forced CS players to use it even though old versions worked without it. And then of course HL2 released and it was a Steam exclusive, which was a huge bummer for people like me who didn't have an internet connection at home at the time.

Gamers have a very short memory, although to be fair many are probably too young to remember Steam's launch. On the other hand they also seem to have very little impulse control so game and platform boycotts never seem to work. I expect that Epic's strategy is going to work perfectly.

Steam was building something new. Quite frankly it's harder to build a crappy platform since the space has already been pioneered. No one is hating on GOG Galaxy.

You have a fair point about many gamers having short memories. Many however do not have short memories. I suspect we're older though.

Epic isn't doing the same thing. Origin's exclusives were EA games. Epic's exclusives are not all Epic games.

Does that make a difference? The end result is the same. Games that that you want to play are locked behind a particular launcher.

Of course it makes a difference. Epic isn't attempting to make their store succeed on its own merits, or on the merit of their own games; they are buying exclusivity in order to succeed.

That upsets people, and rightly so. Epic is using their cash to complete, and are trying to replace something people love with something worse.

You seem to be very emotionally invested in this fight between two corporations. You make it sound that Steam succeed because of some heroic display of courage and selflessness while Epic would be a scheming thief set to destroy it out of spite. Poor Valve, let's start a GoFundMe to help them...

Steam popularized always-online DRM. They attempted to monetize mods. They wrote the book on in-game item trading with TF2 and CS:GO, even if it meant that a bunch of underage kids were effectively becoming gamblers. Steam is not your friend, Steam is a business selling videogames and offering online services.

Most importantly, Steam is more than perfectly capable of fighting back if they see EGS as a threat.

Steam is not our friend, correct. But they also had a quasi monopoly for a long time and didn't become outright evil. I give them a lot of credit for that. Hell they still allow Devs to sell on their own site but give steam keys (afaik for free). My biggest complaint against them is stagnation.

Epic's move worries me. They are spending a lot of cash for exclusives. How do you think they expect to earn it back? I doubt their plan will be in my interest.

That's a bizarre reading of my sentiments. Elsewhere in this thread I state that I prefer GoG.

If I'm going to suffer DRM, then at least the service should provide value adds that make it worthwhile to me. Reviews, cloud saves, good networking, mod management, et cetera.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19598465

When do you actually think that Steam introduced those features? Hint: not as long ago as you likely think.

And I’m not sure why you expect a new service to have all of Steam’s features from day one...

I'm an old man. I remember. I avoided Steam until cloud saves came along.

So it doesn't have Steam's features. I have no obligation to support a billion dollar corporation compete against another, at the expense of my own quality of experience.

> Epic is using their cash to complete, and are trying to replace something people love with something worse.

But this is the point: the fact that Epic is making "something worse" might be true now, but will change in the future. This is precisely what happened with Origin for example, at least in the perception of gamers.

So it's worse now. Why should I, as a consumer, silently accept that so a billion dollar corporation can get a foothold against another billion dollar corporation?

> or on the merit of their own games; they are buying exclusivity in order to succeed. [...] Epic is using their cash to complete, and are trying to replace something people love with something worse.

So? Guess how EA has so many "original" games to begin with? Sounds like people are disgusted because cash bribes sound icky.

It's true, many people have a dim view of those who accept bribes.

Origin is still not a quality experience.

Difference is that it doesn't cost you anything to use Steam, Epic game store, or Origin. You buy the game, you have the game. You can install 5 game stores on your computer and that's it.

For movies or TV series you need to have a subscription. That is the thing that costs money, even if you don't use it. People don't want to have 3 or 4 subscriptions, so that is why they pirate.

This is not a problem I see happening for games.

It's still annoying to deal with any distribution platform that isn't Steam. I understand why things are this way, but it doesn't make it any better from my point of view. I hate having to add my friends on another platform to play Ape Legs or the new Unreal. I don't want to deal with another login, another stupid launcher that wants to be on all the time with incessant updates.

I'm not going to end up pirating games because I mostly play F2P hat simulators, and the singleplayer games I care about are all available on GoG.

It still all feels quite user-hostile. I can't think of a solution though.

The solution is to support single-sign-on and to allow data importing/export. These are solved problems, but companies don't receive enough pressure to do them because they are more interested in building moats.

Game piracy still exists. There's subreddits dedicated to tracking when DRM schemes are broken. Also piracy of region locked and old, difficult to buy now, console games has never disappeared.

The games that are out of this are those that need online accounts to play.

FWIW, in terms of exclusivity, there have been games exclusive to EA's Origin. (e.g. the 2017 Battlefront II).

I'm not sure how significant "any added friction increases piracy" is in terms of numbers.

The difference is that people don't really hate exclusives on the publisher's own store unless the store is awful.

IMHO:

GFWL: awful and hated, dead now

UPlay: awful and hated

Steam: best in class and loved

GoG: second best in class and accepted

Origin: good and tolerated

Blizzard: good and tolerated

Epic: awful and hated

I'd personally put GoG ahead of Steam, and not just for "grr Steam" reasons. Steam has a habit of breaking in weird ways like telling me I can't view my own achievements because my profile is private or suddenly wanting to download 0 bytes for half the games in my library. GoG on the other hand has been totally rock-solid for me.

I prefer GoG, as well. I was attempting to express my understanding of the generally sentiment that I see from gamers

I have a cron job that backs up my library every two weeks via lgogdownloader

People hated Origin pretty bad, but EA stuck to their guns. IMO its a pretty awful experience. And to be honest Steam isn't exactly a great experience either. I noticed they're finally doing a face lift on their storefront soon, perhaps from the competition?

At least Origin didn't vacuum up exclusives from non-EA publishers. People who hated Origin probably already hated EA, too.

The Steam library update had been years in the making.

>UPlay: awful and hated

What's so bad about uplay?

* Reliability (both servers and client). Everytime I try to a play a uplay game I've had to screw around with getting a fresh installation of the uplay client.

* Client performance

* Similar to Origin, part of the motivation is so the games don't have to compete with the price of games on Steam, so end up being more expensive.

In my experience, I'm unlikely to be able to play games due to issues with their auth servers.

It's not Steam. /s

Battlefront 2 is a bad example, as it's a MP game which can't be effectively pirated.

Without piracy, many third-world populations may have never been able to really use computers until about 2005-2010.

You're off by 10-15 years as free software operating systems have been usable since at least the mid 90s. But there was a period before that which what you say was true which was one of the big reasons behind the GNU project.

A subset of piracy, when I was a kid for instance, was not about service but clearly a pricing "problem" (the problem being: I was a kid)

>> We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem [...]

>And it's true

Maybe I'm the exception, but given the choice of shelling out $60 (works out to just over 4 hours of work at median US pay), or waiting a few hours/days/weeks (depending on DRM strength) and getting it for free, I'm picking the latter every time.

edit: changed average pay to median

If you can afford it, please pay for it. I get that not everyone can afford $60 games, but if you would have actually purchased it if pirating wasn't an option, please support the game.

We are seeing this happen as you speak.

With game developers going back to proprietary launchers and platform exclusives, piracy of such games is rising again.

I predict the new Metro and Borderlands games will be heavily pirated.

When the epic launcher lacks more than half of the essential features of Steam, people will boycott your platform for forcing them to use it.

Ironically, an increasing number of parties has been having dollar signs in their eyes as of late, trying to get some of Steam's pie. It's entirely possible that this fate will befall the PC gaming industry at some point.

> TV and Movies on the other hand are getting worse every year, with Netflix focusing on their originals and everybody else doing their own streaming services.

We seem to be at an all-time low of #Bittorrent seeders though.

It’s unfortunate, even on private sites there aren’t as many seeders as they used to be. I have a hard time finding well seeded content from 90s, 80s, and 70s. 10 years ago, things were so much better.

The Steam thing makes sense. However I don't see how Netflix Originals is different than Steam.

>Pirating games has never been as unattractive as it has been today due to Steam's monopoly and ubiquity.

Hang around reddit's /r/crackwatch for some time and tell me how unattractive games piracy is.