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Piracy Is Back: Piracy Statistics for 2023

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Re: Piracy Is Back: Piracy Statistics for 2023

#181

Post by ajross »

squigz wrote: post #112
ajross wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you are particularly unlucky in that your salary didn't keep up with inflation. It did (and more) for everyone else, on average. Check the FRED links I posted elsehwere in this subthread. If you don't believe in economics, why bother to make an economic point? It's really upsetting to me to watch this notionally rationalist community descend into this kind of memery.

"Memery" being people sharing their own experience that happens to differ from the norm...?

No, people making blanket statements about the economy based on their personal experiences (and similar anecdotes they read from forums like this one). Look at the data!

Re: Piracy Is Back: Piracy Statistics for 2023

#182

Post by timbit42 »

that_guy_iain wrote: post #35

> Internet piracy isn’t ethically justifiable, but it is convenient. I don't know. I used to pirate heavily and always said once I could afford to buy stuff I would buy stuff. Then I could afford to buy stuff so I bought stuff, I used Netflix, Amazon Prime, Spotify, etc. Then I started to lose things I bought. Until they make digital purchases an actual purchase then I choose to boycott them and pirate instead. Boyco…

This is what Charlie Brown feels like when trying to kick Lucy Van Pelt's football.

Re: Piracy Is Back: Piracy Statistics for 2023

#183

Post by orwin »

ajross wrote: post #101
orwin wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This meme is backed by US government data https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2023/demo/p60-27... """ Highlights: - Real median household income was $74,580 in 2022, a 2.3 percent decline from the 2021 estimate of $76,330 (Figure 1 and Table A-1). - Householders under the age of 65 experienced a decline in median household income of 1.4 percent from 2021, while householders aged 65 and over did not experience…

2021-22 is cherry-picked to land dead center in the middle of the inflation burst. Check the FRED charts I posted elsewhere in this thread and look to numbers before covid. They literally say the opposite.

Also, sorry if it seems I pile on you, but I was looking at disposable income for an unrelated reason and thought back at our discussion, changed to country to the US, and once again confirmed my original thoughts.

Here the gross per capita disposable income 2008-2022: https://data.oecd.org/chart/7hG5

Once again, a lot of limits: 2022 was indeed worse than surrounding years, it's per capita, because median it really hard to find, and income is not really meaningful, not if the subject is the working poor.

Re: Piracy Is Back: Piracy Statistics for 2023

#184

Post by voisin »

ghaff wrote: post #100
voisin wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Illegal downloading of copyrighted materials takes up 24% of the global bandwidth. This seems shockingly high. I wonder how different this is geographically. I would think streaming via Netflix and others, YouTube, Twitch, etc would have shrunk illegal streaming to a much smaller percentage of the total.

I'm sure it varies a lot geographically. In the US, I expect the bulk is streaming services as you say. While I'm sure there are many outliers on a forum like this, most people subscribe to a few services and watch what's available. I know I do. I'll rarely look for something elsewhere if I can't easily get it via streaming (whether subscription or a la carte). I have no particular insight into the global situation b…

So let’s say it varies geographically and the majority is in developing nations where finances don’t allow for relative luxuries like streaming services so people disproportionately turn to torrents. I suspect this is accurate. In this instance, what’s the point of trying to lock down illegal streaming? There isn’t an opportunity cost being missed, and the people can’t afford to pay fines, so it seems like a no win situation. Let them be and maybe as those countries develop and people become wealthier they follow the same path as developed nations where most people pay for the ease of streaming.

Re: Piracy Is Back: Piracy Statistics for 2023

#185

Post by benhurmarcel »

Veuxdo wrote: post #28
baka367 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with Gabe here. I basically stopped pirating games once I could add something that I like to my collection during steam sale for a nice discount instead of waiting for days for whatever service to ship it. I can also return it if I end up not lilinkg it, not like with a physical copy.

Many others didn't. Steam games are widely pirated.

They’re widely pirated by people who can’t afford them.

Re: Piracy Is Back: Piracy Statistics for 2023

#186

Post by ajross »

orwin wrote: post #183
ajross wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2021-22 is cherry-picked to land dead center in the middle of the inflation burst. Check the FRED charts I posted elsewhere in this thread and look to numbers before covid. They literally say the opposite.

Also, sorry if it seems I pile on you, but I was looking at disposable income for an unrelated reason and thought back at our discussion, changed to country to the US, and once again confirmed my original thoughts. Here the gross per capita disposable income 2008-2022: https://data.oecd.org/chart/7hG5 Once again, a lot of limits: 2022 was indeed worse than surrounding years, it's per capita, because median it really…

Again, this is horrible, horrible cherry picking!

1. 2022 was right in the middle of the disruption, which is now over.

2. You're showing a derivative chart and not the value, which amplifies noise into signal. What if it showed a giant leap in the following quarter (which it does!), would you change your mind from "it's terrible" to "it's amazing"?

3. Disposable income tends to be a noisy statistic anyway as it's a delta statistic conflates motion of two different measurables (income and expenses) that are perfectly measurable by themselves.

4. You're just wrong anyway. Here's the FRED chart (always go to FRED, always, everyone else is peddling something) of exactly the statistic you posted. Tell me if this chart is consistent with the story you interpreted:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DSPI

Edit, sorry: that was the nominal chart, here's the inflation-correct one. Needless to say, it tells the same story:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DSPIC96

Re: Piracy Is Back: Piracy Statistics for 2023

#187

Post by pierat »

ghaff wrote: post #163
me_me_me wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when you are young you have a lot of time and not a lot of money. Naturally attracted to piracy. When you are an adult you have more money then time. Naturally attracted to just buy it as its the easiest. You might never be able to root out piracy amongst the young people and if you do they will not pay since they cannot afford it. But doing so will make your service less convenient for everyone. So you gained no ext…

People with more time than money vs. people with more money than time applies in a lot of contexts. You even see it in a company context--why pay someone for this service when you could just do it yourself? I know I could do it in a day. (Well, it's a distraction that we don't need and, if we can offload it that makes sense for us to do.)

I pirate BECAUSE of my rights.

I used to buy loads of legit content. VHS macrovision degraded quality for "anti-piracy purposes". Basically it flashed contrast and automatic gain would fuck up.

Then it was DVD. This was probably the best format cause it was easy to rip. Again, ripping is illegal cause DMCA (Note: breaking DMCA is worse a crime than copyright infringement). Its yet another case where property rights are superseded by some bullshit intellectual right. These media fucks couldnt be happy to just sell content... they wanted to sell it again and again and again.

Then HD-DVD came out for a short while. Supported by MS and Xbox. I didnt buy it, and the format died. No big loss since everything that Im aware of was also published on Bluray.

And Bluray. It's a cracked format. Discs and players demand internet connection. Bunch of anti-purchaser crap. There's rippers for this stuff too.

And now, it's streaming streaming streaming. You never get any discs, and you never retain ownership of any shows. There is no more "loan buddy the DVD". You now have to provide the login, which is of course linked to your CC number. And because of "streaming", when you leave, you take nothing with you.

-------

Whereas piracy, I download it once, and I have it. It'll work on any device. I can back it up. I can put it on a media server. I can copy it to a friend (sharing is caring, right?). Nothing is fighting me tooth and nail each step.

So, even if I have enough money for as much music and videos as I want, why in the hell would I pay piles-o-money for garbage service, garbage quality media, abusive handling of customer, and little to nothing to show for money paid?

Nah, I'll stick with piracy. I get treated better in that avenue all around.

Re: Piracy Is Back: Piracy Statistics for 2023

#188

Post by davkan »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #67
scrlk wrote: post #4

To quote Gabe Newell: > "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a…

Well, I'd stop paying for Netflix well before I'd stop paying for Spotify because Spotify has much closer to the "everything"of that particular form of entertainment than Netflix does, and new albums and songs are relatively instantly available on the service. For whatever reason, the ability to arrange music licensing to allow for an aggregator of everything is much easier than for movie and TV show licensing.

Spotify lacks when you venture into niche older genres. I was doing a deep dive into ska and rocksteady and the content on Spotify was not at all complete. A quick visit to the successor of what.cd and I’ve got access to more accurately cataloged releases than I could listen to.

There’s no such thing as casual music discovery though with piracy. It’s a bit like visiting the largest record store ever built. You’ve gotta thumb through the albums and talk to the other nerds.

Re: Piracy Is Back: Piracy Statistics for 2023

#189

Post by quadrifoliate »

ajross wrote: post #180
quadrifoliate wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first graph for Median usual weekly real earnings shows a fall from 393 in Q2 2020 to 365 in Q2 2023. Your third graph for Real Median Household Income shows a fall from 76,660 in 2020 to 74,580 today. Even though I find it hard to take the reported inflation numbers seriously because they aren't calculated off a fixed basket of goods any more [1], those graphs don't seem to say we have more "real" wages now com…

You're cherry picking the peak (literally the peak) of the covid relief though! People got huge checks in the first half of 2020, do you not remember? Why would you do that? You can see it's an outlier, growing rapidly then shrinking. Look at Q4 2019 to get pre-covid numbers and you'll see (1) there's a clear trend across the disruption and (2) it's clearly going up.

Okay, but then Real Median Income still goes down from 78,250 in 2019 to 74,580.

You probably shouldn't go too far before Covid. People aren't going to think back to how things were ~5 years before Covid, they are going back to a couple years before.

Re: Piracy Is Back: Piracy Statistics for 2023

#190

Post by greycol »

nicolaslem wrote: post #116
al_borland wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Price is part of it, and paying customers should never have a worse experience than those getting something for free. With DRM, activation severs that can be shut down, exclusivity deals, and fragmentation of marketplaces… paying customers often get a worse experience.

I wish Valve used their weight to cut down on the DRM, online activation and micro-transaction bullshit.

I'd just like a DRM filter on steam. You can filter out free to play and DLC so they never appear on the store page. It would be great if you could also filter out DRM (even by type if they're feeling motivated).

Then i'd bet if they gave the publisher statistics on how many people never see their game because it contains denuvo or a 3rd party launcher you'd see meanigful change, and if not then at least the store is nicer for the steam customers who care about it.

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