> I wonder why it is that Steam hasn't had any issues remaining such a successful video game platform, while other forms of media have struggled to keep up.

it's privately owned

and by someone that loves video games that was already wealthy when he founded the company

Steam is successful because its advertising is rather low key, showing a popup with offers, and providing a search, directory plus suggestions. Their gain is from consumer analytics too. (They also take a cut for using their platform from the game developers or publishers.

It also provides some added value like achievements, basic social media in forms of forums and chat, some (somewhat broken at times) controller handling, some bug reporting, cloud save handling, voice communication handling, even some space to host game related content. On the whole, more value added than taken by paltry ads. The bigger value minus is the "Steam DRM" - requirement for an online connection to use the downloaded application. And providence help you if you post inflammatory comments under an account that owns game access licenses. You will lose that.

The other ones don't do it quite as effectively, esp. the suggestions part. Being a game library and download service is not what makes Steam in particular good, though it is an essential part.

Steam's most important advertising is actually quite in your face, and used to occupy a good part of the gaming sphere for a couple of weeks each year: their sales with discounts between 50-90% (calculated from the current "regular price" which for older games is often already far below original retail price). They've switched it up in recent years, making the summer sales tamer in exchange for more weekly sales, but the concept stays the same: sell "old" games for prices you can't refuse. And that's why people don't mind: when they tell you it's a great offer it genuinely is.

Everyone else in gaming is fighting for the newest releases. That's the battleground XBox and Playstation use, and that's where newcomers like the Epic Game Store try to beat Steam. Steam meanwhile is pretty toned down on new releases, and is going for long tail sales instead.

They are really good at it, too. Fallout 4 for just 8€? Brilliant, I've heard so much about it, let me check it out. But just 5€ more and I get all the DLC? And there's a bundle with Skyrim? Before I realise whats going on I spent 30€ on games released a decade ago that I don't really have time to play anyway.

Bethesda releases aren't games you play, they're hobbies you pursue. Imagine all the enjoyable hours you'll spend browsing nexus and creating a stable environment for each of the games you own. It's almost like having an aquarium.

Skyrim is the raspberry pi of video games. So many hours getting something “just right” to the follow up by never using it for that purpose. Always good to have around though just in case.

It’s important to take Steam DRM in context. In a world where DRM was becoming more intrusive by the day, and you had to contend with every game having its own unique way to mess your system up in its fight against piracy, Steam provided one single DRM system that almost everybody agrees to use. For consumers, worse than no DRM, but miles ahead of the status quo it replaced.

Also, Steam does have an offline mode. You just have to ping the mothership every few weeks iirc.

To add to this, the original Witcher is the game that made me decide I was never again going to install a game directly. It was going to be steam or gog, and I've kept to that over the years with few exceptions (rpg maker games, etc).

As a freelance developer I would run vmware with a dedicated partition for the VM. The VM was linux and the partition itself was either ext3 or reiserFS (can't remember).

Since Windows didn't recognize the partition, the DRM for witcher repartitioned that drive so it would have a "secret" partition to track who knows what.

That affected my ability to earn money and was doing things to my PC I would never have accepted if asked.

compared to that, steam is a godsend. I understand people complaining about steam, but to this day I'm still a huge fan of steam for what it forced the gaming industry to accept.

I still prefer GoG due to its policies, but steam is fantastic.

You can download all 3 Witcher games without DRM after buying them on GoG. Did you have the standalone version? I don't understand why they put a DRM in it.

This was back when Witcher first released, they removed the DRM at some point.

Here are a few links referencing it.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/33250/discussions/0/558752451...

https://www.gog.com/forum/the_witcher/tags_drm_in_the_witche...

In some ways, Steam has provided an experience better than having no DRM. I can hop in a friend's computer and download any game I've purchased. Or I can delete old games to free up space and redownload them later (without having to deal with DVDs or external USB drives).

The tradeoff is handing over the control of my game library to a company. I can see how that tradeoffs can be compelling to some and not worthwhile to others.

The thing is Valve is the sort of company that has built that elusive relationship - trust - so much so that I would expect them to arrange for some way to keep people most of their games if the service was shutdown, and if they didn’t, it would be a surprise.

If Valve ever stabbed me in the back I could just pirate my library back, so I'm not that worried.

Yeah it feels like people forgot about the Sony Rootkit DRM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...) that ended up exploited by malware.

It's also important to remember that SteamWorks DRM is optional. There are many games that will work without steam installed.

Most of the games from big studios still use their own DRM on Steam because Steam DRM is worthless, I can crack it in 5 seconds for any game on steam, that's why you often see games that have Steam+Denuvo or Steam+CustomDRM.

I use gog.com instead of steam where I can. They provide DRM free installers for all their games (this may have changed more recently not sure).

Anyway gog is really great :)

> "Steam DRM" - requirement for an online connection to use the downloaded application

It's not a requirement. It's to the discretion of the game developer on whether or not they want to require it to play their game.

True, but it's (as far as I know) the only DRM that is not listed in the store page. "Third party" DRMs like Denuvo must be listed there, but Steam's gets a free pass.

For me it’s about context. Steam ads do not bother me that much since it’s easy to turn off/dismiss, but also importantly they're "first party" - I’m already on steam and a gaming mood so I don’t mind checking out offers for other games.

Streaming ads are annoying because under no circumstances I'd be thinking of picking up tampons while watching a football game.

What's your thoughts on targeted ads in general?

Setting aside the ease of dismissing - would you be willing to give up some data to allow them to be smarter (having more context)?

Not OP but honestly i am tired of it. If i'm on stackoverflow, i want to see ads for a new course, a job posting or a clickbait tech article on a new stack that makes Java bearable. When i'm researching some obscure history, i don't mind ads about JC Martin latest book available on amazon (and i might even buy it!), and when i'm looking for camping gear, i don't mind ads for other camping gear.

That i get ads for camping gear when i'm looking for information on the French second restoration, and when that ad takes my whole screen, i get fed up and reinstall ublock.

It's easy. I know one person who made a lot of money from blogging. Affiliate links + direct ads to Festool or a know paint company. It beats adtech by a mile five years ago (for revenue at least). I think it doesn't work as well now with Intagram and tiktok, but he still get money from that.

Those ads are why you can crank an obscure topic like the second French restoration into Google and get useful information.

Or you could just go straight to Wikipedia, whose only ads are for Wikipedia fund drives.

There was a time when the internet was not beholden to advertisers, but still managed to deliver all kinds of lovingly/obsessively detailed sites on obscure topics like the second French restoration. It was slower and jankier and (arguably) harder to navigate, but it showed that many people are happy to produce and maintain online content without resorting to ad-veillance.

Well with the right approach, you don't need to give any data. I've said before on here that I think affiliate marketing is acceptable for text content, if the thing that I'm recommended is actually something I'd use. Caveat is it should be both obvious it's an affiliate link, but also unobtrusive and I should gain value from the material, not just link-stuffing every other word in a recipe blog.

The video equivalent is the sponsored segment, which producers insert because they know people block ads and they don't make enough from YouTube alone. These can be good if they're actually relevant to the content. The problem is when I'm watching a video about coffee and the presenter tries, for the umpteenth time, to sell me Squarespace. Usually the product in the video is also affiliate-linked in the description (plus all the AV gear the producer uses) In contrast, I'll watch someone like MarcoReps shill me JLPCB because he's using the boards in the video and they actually look good.

In both cases, I think targeted affiliate advertising can work if it's done well, and it's a lot better than generic follow-me advertising that has no relevant to the page content.

I am not willing to give up my personal data for the sake of advertising. I don’t understand stand why advertisers need to be so intrusive. If you visit a tech news site vs a celebrity news site like TMZ, you can make some generalizations about the audiences without more evasive targeting.

In a hypothetical world where personal data is securely shared and stored, I'd prefer a more targeted ads (if ad free is not an option or the price of that option does not justify the content)

I personally do not mind the idea of targeted ads and data brokers but as a software engineer I know my data is not safe due to ignorance or incompetence

I often wonder how much better the click through rates are for Steam than the ad industry as a whole. I’d estimate that I typically click on at least 4-5 ads on the steam home page a week. I actively enjoy scrolling through them to see if there’s anything that looks interesting to me.

What also helps if having a non garbage client. The Xbox windows client? Are you kidding me Microsoft?

Among other things, Steam is not operated by a publicly-traded company.

They don't need to answer to faceless shareholders at the end of every quarter. They can settle for making whatever they consider to be "enough money" without chasing endless growth.

Steam still has shareholders to answer to, with the same human motives as any shareholder, so I don't think this argument holds water. I suspect they'd try to get whatever growth they can because otherwise eventually someone will overtake them.

And empirically they are still growing at rates [1] not common among any class of companies, so someone there is certainty pushing for incredible growth.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/308330/number-stream-use...

The difference is that their shares are not publicly offered. Their shareholders much more likely to be people with vested interests in the company's long-term health, rather than retail investors and hedge funds who reliably demand short-term returns.

Also I'm pretty sure they are making enough money as they are. And don't need to chase that ever increasing stock valuation. Which might not even mean increased profits.

But public stocks seems to focus on valuation over profits, which is reasonable given how things turned out.

Apple going from 1 trillion to 2 trillion valuation is much more valuable to shareholders than Apple paying out 100 billion in profits. But if the stocks aren't publicly traded then the main pay-out are the profits, so they try to maximize profit over growth, which is probably much healthier for the economy overall.

This is false. Amazon had zero profits for a very long time and was publicly traded. It did very well. There are numerous examples like this.

That is exactly what I said, publicly traded companies cares about growth over profits, while companies that never intends to go public and therefore doesn't benefit from valuations tend to care about profit over growth.

Profit and growth go together. In Amazon's case lots of profit is what fueled their growth: at each point they made far more money than needed to sustain, so they bought growth instead of paying out to shareholders.

The two are intricately related.

Sorry I misread your comment. Either way I don't think either extreme viewpoint is right. I'd say publicly traded companies and their investors care about both growth and profits for different reasons.

The majority of public shares are held in long term investments like 401ks, whose owners are most certainly interested in long term growth. Buy and hold is by far the biggest amount of investment type of stockholder. Most people don't care to fiddle with microtrading.

As the buffet bet made clear, and as the majority of advice and investors do, long term ownership outgrows those chasing short term returns, despite pop belief.

I think you vastly overestimate the dollar amounts behind stock owners.

Retail investors and hedge funds do not always demand short-term results. If that was the case, Tesla and growth companies like it would simply not exist on the stock market. Instead, they are wildly popular.

But they plan to make money from selling the stocks, not from actual dividends.

What makes you think this? Did you look it up? Have a source?

Every 401k or other investment place I've seen allows either taking dividends or reinvesting them. I've never one seen a fund that picks only divide free or divided providing stocks as a choice.

And every big fund also provides all sorts of general index funds, which certainly contain both. And individual stocks themselves decide to pay dividends or not, and routinely change so.

I don't think your distinction is at all a relevant factor in these funds to nearly any end buyer.

Please provide a citation as to why you think your claim is true.

Netflix is publicly traded and had managed to avoid shoving ads down the throats of user for almost as long as Steam has been around.

Steam is moreso lucky that the PC market was pretty much ignored by all the large game publishers for a very long time and had very little competition. We will see what happens in another 10 years now that even Sony is launching it's own PC launcher. PC is now more important (even Japan is finally opening to the gaming PC scene).

What was the rationale for publicly-traded companies again? Because it sounds like having publicly-traded companies make things worse for the companies themselves and for society in general.

> I wonder why it is that Steam hasn't had any issues remaining such a successful video game platform, while other forms of media have struggled to keep up.

Well, Youtube's ad problem comes from the fact that it is run by the largest internet advertiser. Netflix--video streaming in general--suffers from the fact that there are very few major content producers, and after seeing the monetary success of Netflix, the content producers decided to create their own streaming platforms and deliver their content only via them.

While there have been attempts to build alternative video game platforms than Steam (notably Epic Games Store and Origin), they haven't been able to enforce an exclusivity deal of the kind that showed up in video streaming. I'm not entirely certain why, but it seems to be a mixture of the lack of centralization in developers (so must-have is much less a factor in video games as it is for movies), the need for multi-platform distribution anyways to reach consoles, and the necessary social media integration (you need friend lists to be able to invite friends) making fragmentation more painful for users.

Epic game store definitely tries to enforce exclusivity. Prime example beeing Square Enix games. FF7 Remake first released on Epic Game Store and only much later released on Steam. Kingdom Hearts still isn't available in Steam and probably never will be. It's one of the prime reasons I will never buy from them. That way lies madness.

Yes, they've tried to, but as I've said, it hasn't been particularly effective. Most of the games that had the year-long Epic store exclusivity period happily released on Steam at the end of that period.

Epic even gives away two games a week. Still doesn't make much of a difference.

Epic giveaway tactics is mainly targeted at their Fortnite audience. There are some kids who never had a Steam account before, but who play Fortnite. So Epic goal is to get them on the hook by providing them with a library of free games.

At the same time giveaways mean very little for existing Steam audience. Piracy was always easy on PC and gamers choose Steam over piracy not jusf because of law or moral reasons, but because Steam is more convinient and offer tons of features.

EGS is simply lacking a lot of niche, but importanf features. Most people likely only ever 5% of Steam features, but you soon find how useful are some of them when you try other platform.

Origin is so bad that nobody would ever install anything but an exclusive from there. I would rather install a new App Store.

Both origin and epic do not support having a space in your password.

I'm sure the rest of the code is top notch as well :D :D

Yup.

Thanks, Unity CEO.

At the end of the day a movie or tv show is a non-interactive stream of media that has two states, play or pause. (Rewind, fast forward and skip sometimes too.)

A games launcher is a lot more complicated. A few publishers have tried their hand at it (EA Origin, Ubisoft Uplay) and for the most part they suck.

I disagree re Netflix. They invented their own problems by pivoting from an video platform to a platform that measured itself by how much attention it could steal or time it could waste.

You may recall they were patting themselves in the back by adopting this strategy of minimally viable programming. Well, Disney got their shit together and turns out people want to watch good TV. Whatcha know?

It’s a management failure and the ad pivot is a bigger failure. If there was a board with a clue, they would fire the management and start over.

Steam was at the right place at the right time. Also it was more insidious in its behavior. Throughout the late 2000s and 2010s most AAA games were Steam releases only. Even boxed copies were not much more than a Steam code. This allowed them to build a powerful network effect. At some point gamers were demanding that any new big release was a Steam release ("no steam no buy").

This does make some sense. Games are big (file size wise) and prone to updates. Steam helped handle this distribution in a reasonable way.

It's also why people prefer app stores or package managers, because they give a predictable distribution experience over hunting for scattered software.

I'd say the problem with Steam is that it should have a community-run alternative/competitor. There hasn't been much push for one since Steam isn't a walled garden and Valve has historically been pretty ethical, but still...

> Games are big (file size wise) and prone to updates. Steam helped handle this distribution in a reasonable way.

Indeed. Steam is the original package manager of Windows. It's so good that nobody really remembers what it was like before Steam. They don't remember downloading and manually applying half a dozen incremental patches to their games. People are used to its incredible convenience now.

As far as DRM content licensing digital fiefdoms go, it's certainly the least bad. It's easy to forget that we don't really own anything on Steam. It certainly pisses me off when other studios start launching shitty alternatives to it that are even worse in every single way.

Also Steam's CDN is extremely fast in my experience. I'm surprised how MSFS2020 downloader sucks.

There's another factor too: Steam just plain doesn't change the store that much. When I open the Steam store to browse, I bypass literally everything to scroll to the bottom of the page. There I will find a few tabbed lists. One will show me new and "trending" games (I have no idea what they consider trending), one will show me the current top selling games, and another will show me upcoming games that are receiving hype. I rarely ever view anything else on that page unless they're running a seasonal sale.

> The age of mindless consumption is nearing an end

I think the only thing that could do that is a degree of general poverty so great that mindless consumption immediately impacts survival. And even then some people would choose intoxicants over food and shelter.

> “ I can download any show or movie I want and have it playing in minutes without having to deal with multi platform bullshit.”

Is this as true as it once was? It seems most of the old trackers are offline or dead now. I’d guess because of the success of streaming services finally meeting the market demand. It’s also possible I’m just old and out of the loop now.

More so than ever before. The only difference is that it's all a lot more decentralized. The easiest source of information is from legal filings. A lazy way to get this it to search Google for whatever, and at the bottom it will state something like 'In response to US DMCA we've removed [x] results from this page. You can read the complaints here, here, here...' Read the complaints. Otherwise you can search for more select filings. For instance this [1] is an older report from the RIAA on "Notorious Markets." They're quite a friendly organization - providing URLS, descriptions, and details on each site even including their modus operandi.

Also if you happen to speak a language outside the big Western languages, then it's all trivial and a simple search anywhere will yield even better than above.

[1] - https://torrentfreak.com/images/Notorious_Markets_Submission...

The availability of content is still superior to paid offerings. The problem is discoverability.

10+ years ago you could get a well seeded torrent anything by googling "anything+torrent". Nowadays you can still get anything but you have to be way more tech savvy and have to break out of your comfort zone. This could mean invite only sites,Russian speaking sites,Fiddling with baidu download scripts etc.

Seeing how much activity peak mininova had[0] compared to the public tracker offerings of today makes me a bit sad. There are still great places to leech some warez but "the more the merrier" is always true for p2p based sharing :^)

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20090114215808/http://www.minino...

I've literally looked for things that I could reasonably expect to be on the Internet and couldn't find them on the Internet. The newest hot thing is still available, of course, but an obscure 5 years old show may not always be.

>I've literally looked for things that I could reasonably expect to be on the Internet and couldn't find them on the Internet.

Everything is in private communities now. Almost all the content you can think exists on usenet, but all the good indexers are invite-only (and often pay to play. My usenet subscription + the yearly fees to various private trackers was just a little less expensive than Netflix (up until the most recent price hike).

With all due respect, probably you just have to look harder. I managed to track down a clean scene release of an 18 year old PC game[0] just a few hours ago with the help of Yandex and the offline translator plugin for Firefox.

[0]: https://predb.de/rls/Wings_Of_War_DVD-HOODLUM

usenet is taking off in a big way (does 1979 tech really count as taking off?).

Alternatively, invite-only/private torrent trackers are as good/better than the old days.

Way harder for regular folks to break into the scene, but it's far more "professional"(?) now

Be like me and keep seeding the stuff that’s going to be obscure in 5 years.

Of course, you’ll need to wait for me to open up my client every couple weeks, but you’ll get it eventually.

The problem with seeding, for me, is that it effectively implies a need to keep two copies of content. One however you downloaded it and then one actually named properly and stored in a reasonable hierarchy... (Not to mention all the *.nfo and *.lnk they include!)

Hardlink or reflink could be your friend.

Hardlink ftw. The only problem is when contents are compressed into rar or whatever. For video it doesnt even make sense from space-saving angle. Anyone can explain why so much torrents are like this?

I wanted to watch the currently in-progress season of a certain anime via the usual legit sites like Crunchyroll, Funimation, etc. All of this anime's seasons are now "not available in my region due to licensing issues".

The DVD/Blu-Ray season sets cost 85-90€ each(!!!) for 13 (~20-22 minutes) episodes per season. That price to me is simply unacceptable, since that's more for one season than the entirety of series like "Friends" or "House, M.D.", either of which provide vastly more content and are WAY more popular than any anime.

As it stands now, I'll probably just wait until the last six episodes of this season become available then use the free "test period" for the "aniverse" channel on Prime Video, on which I arbitrarily can't watch 1080p HD because I have the absolute audacity of not using Windows (a problem which downloads from certain ... 3rd-party sites do not share).

>and are WAY more popular than any anime.

Which is why they can get away with charging less per copy.

But it's a self-perpetuating death loop problem. At those prices, the only buyers are extreme fans buying it almost more like a merchandise item (compare figurines) than people who want to view the content. I know this is a thing in Japan-- the anime releases tend to be a few episodes at a time, at prices that would be considered astronomical most places.

There are potentially many market equilibria-- selling 200 copies at $100, 400 copies at $50, or 1000 copies at $10.

If they switched to a bargain-priced model, you enable tsundoku-style purchasing-- put up a big display of "here's a hundred back-catalog series, 13 episodes on two DVDs in a flimsy cardboard sleeve for 1000 yen each", people would be willing to take much more risk on buying them.

Arguably, there's a lot of information being lost because they only see purchase data of people hardcore enough to pay the current high prices. (I wonder if to an extent this impacts anime's tendency for fanservice choices-- they're chasing an artificially narrow market)

There's still the opportunity for price-discrimination for fanatics with limited editions with better packaging, extra content, and feelies.

It's interesting to contrast that the price of manga was almost impossibly low. In Japan, (at least it used to be) like 1/3 the price as in the US for a 200-page volume, and the omnibus magazines were pretty cheap, which made it more amenable to risk-taking purchases.

Japanese manga is still really cheap. The latest volume of One Piece is 484 Yen on Amazon Japan which is about $3.50 USD. An English US volume is $10. Books in Japan are absurdly cheap in general, I believe by law.

Anime though is often way way cheaper in the US although that may have changed since Sony started buying up most of the players. Although this does have some downsides as US releases are usually hard-coded to have English subs on when using Japanese voices, no Japanese subs etc. to try and discourage reverse importing. But yeah easily a 5th the cost of collecting the whole set from the Japanese releases. Only Aniplex (who Sony owned) would do the garbage $80 for 2-3 episodes in US.

The same thing is frequently true of Japanese video games as well, often seemingly arbitrarily costing several times comparable titles. I'm quite curious what drives this "cultural" phenomena. It seems almost certain that their price:demand curve is messed up to the point that lowering the price would result in increased revenue, but they seem very content to stick with this system - apparently outside of games as well.

Anybody with any insights into Japanese culture/business? I've always wondered why this was, or if it's something as simple as inertia.

Anyway now Blu-ray for anime is tend to be a fan goods rather than practical media, while paperbook is still decent media for manga. Many people no longer have Blu-ray player equipment, and obviously not work for smartphone/tablet. Average people just watch anime by streaming subscription. Manga subscription is growing but not a major thing for popular mangas.

TPB is still going strong. Older content is sometimes difficult to find but anything new or even slightly popular from the last 50 years is more-often-than-not obtainable.

Imagine a world where anyone who wants can set up his little torrent seedbox sharing with the whole globe some content they really like without worrying about getting a nice little letter in the mail. I'm pretty sure if people were free to do so (and cheap and easy commercial options sprung up) we would be able to find any content we desire and download it and (if it's popular enough) even stream it

For comedy gold, look through the DMCA notifications that Google links you to, and that's your index of helpful and current torrent sites. Many are very usable through machine translation too.

Google and bing filter out the results you want. Other search engines work fine.

Yes, this is absolutely still true if you have access to a couple private trackers.

Just hop on over to Rutracker, there's plenty of stuff. And Usenet is still great for movies and TV, although in my experience music is getting a lot harder to find (the wide and free/cheap availability of music streaming probably has something to do with this).

Hi, yes, as true at it ever was. Indeed, the choice is wider than all the paid streaming services combined.

Is HN an example of mindless consumption?

Maybe not. As far as I can tell it doesn't prioritize engagement/hours spent over everything else, first page is a mixture of very niche stuff and very common stuff with very little clickbait either way.

To me HN feels like having a conversation with an interesting friend. It's not necessarily the most productive thing to do, nor it has any other major goal inherent to it, still at the end of the day it doesn't feel mindless or time lost.

To compare, if I use Twitter for 10mins, it's 1min of entertainment at best and 9minutes of bullshit/flamebait/doomscrolling/shallow crap that makes me feel dizzy by the end of it.

Funny you should say that.

I got into a bit of a twitter rabbit hole and ended up realizing my heart was racing, knuckles white and teeth grinding.

I was furiously pounding on my keyboard to reply to what was probably a bot before I came to my senses and closed the page.

I can see how that shit is addictive.

Rage is a hell of drug.

It's definitely not its design goal as far as I can tell. However we the people in general have addictive tendencies and we're just kind of turning HN into every other compulsively scrolling social media.

But that's on us.

The age of mindless consumption has fully arrived, with AI-driven platforms like TikTok feeding you endless content for free. It's just that selling behavior manipulation of your users (e.g. ads) turned out to be a better business model than (honest) subscription payments.

That's refreshing to read. I thought I was the only one tired of reruns of the office and south park combined with vapid cheaply produced reality and tik tok video clip replay shows.

I really wonder why anyone would dump $100 or more on cable TV any more unless perhaps they need to watch sports channels.

Commercials are dull as well, the way they repeat "accidentally"... ugh.

It will eventually burn out once the pandemic isolation is all over.

It's really going to be a drought for blockbuster entertainment, At least we have plenty of 90s movies and music to fall back on, It's a good thing I kept my old DVDs, Mp4s, Mp3s, and my DVDr drive... No commercials at all unless I want to see them. :)

> I can download any show or movie I want

The golden age of movie piracy has already passed. It is becoming quite hard to pirate 10y+ movies at a good quality. Also, streaming services do offer remastered film versions rarely available for pirates.

> The age of mindless consumption is nearing an end.

How so?

It's a strange state when YouTube videos of villagers in Africa building a mud hut or a guy in Asia building a fish tank taken with cheap cameras by amateur videographers are many times more entertaining then Hollywood blockbusters that cost 10's of millions to make.

Isn’t that entirely subjective? More interesting to how many people? Would people pay money to watch?

What is locally crafted consumption?

Artisanal cheeses and beers, for example.