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I pirated Game of Thrones season premiere

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Re: I pirated Game of Thrones season premiere

#51

Post by edent »

calinet6 wrote: post #16
Samuel_Michon wrote: post #11

I agree with all of sentiments in the blog post but this: “Why should almost 40% of my time be taken up by adverts for something I am ALREADY paying for?” Your cable subscription is a partial payment for viewing the shows. It's works in the same way as buying a newspaper or magazine: the revenues from newsstand sales are a fraction of what it costs to create and distribute the publication. The rest is paid through ad…

I wonder how much people would pay for advertising-free television?

In the UK we pay £145 per year [0] - call that US$250. For that we get 3 HD channels, 2 SD channels, 2 kids channels, a 24 hour news channel, a dozen national radio stations, and a bunch of local stations. All FTA via your aerial.

Oh, and you get the BBC websites.

All without adverts.

Totally worth it.

[0] http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/check-if-you-need-one/topics/tv...

Re: I pirated Game of Thrones season premiere

#52

Post by EthanHeilman »

calinet6 wrote: post #12

Pirating has become a much higher quality entertainment experience than any other. The pace of development is insane, and the things you can do with pirated content these days are, in a word, wonderful. Let's say I pirated a show called Fest of Kings. The hour Fest of Kings aired, it would already be on my home media server. It would have downloaded at about 6MB/second (that's MegaBytes) over a secure SSL connection…

Netflix does under certain circumstances does provide a better experience than piracy.

* You don't have to wait 5 minutes to watch the show, it starts playing instantly.

* You don't have to worry about storage or codecs.

* If you don't know what to watch, netflix can help with that.

* If you are on a train or bus, generally you can get netflix and watch movies on your phone. I do this quite regularly.

This isn't to say there aren't serious advantages to piracy or legal downloading (it doesn't work on linux), there are. Steaming can be a disaster if the internet is having a bad hair day. It depends on circumstance and goals. I invested in netflix the day I saw someone unwilling to wait for a show to download and use netflix instead.

Steam combines the best of both worlds. I just wish they would add a DRM free at 365 days from launch feature + price drops to 5 dollars.

Re: I pirated Game of Thrones season premiere

#53

Post by hawleyal »

citricsquid wrote: post #13

People have always been, and always will be, willing to pay for good products. We have always understood Return on Investment, even if we don’t call it that. Which is why World Of Goo[0], a fantastic indie game that was priced at $20, that has a 90 / 100 Metacritic score[1], that has absolutely no DRM is a game that had over 80% piracy rate at launch? The "People want to pay it's just the companies stopping them" arg…

Do you think it would have been supremely popular without all those extra players?

Re: I pirated Game of Thrones season premiere

#54

Post by wtvanhest »

imgabe wrote: post #26

I did too. I would happily pay a reasonable price for the show, but HBO doesn't offer an option to do that. I cancelled my cable subscription months ago because there's really only a few shows I want to watch and they're on HBO. Paying an extra $50 a month ($600 a year) to watch two shows is ridiculous. I like the way Downton Abbey was distributed on Amazon. It was, I think, $2 an episode with a small discount if you…

"I would happily pay a reasonable price for the show"

The price they are charging is the bundled price. The fact that you do not get enough value from the bundled price means that you don't have to pay for it, but it also doesn't mean you can steal it.

If you go to the store and someone is selling a 30 pack of toilet paper but you only need 5 rolls because you live alone, you can't simply take 5 rolls, and say, "the price I would have to pay to get 5 rolls is ridiculous, so I'm not paying".

"HBO doesn't offer an option to do that" because they have determined that the revenue/profit they earn from bundling HBO with cable is higher then by selling HBO alone since cable isn't as desirable as it used to be.

The way to think about it is, HBO costs $600/year and you get some crappy free TV with it.

Re: I pirated Game of Thrones season premiere

#55

Post by jamespo »

marknutter wrote: post #33
citricsquid wrote: post #13

People have always been, and always will be, willing to pay for good products. We have always understood Return on Investment, even if we don’t call it that. Which is why World Of Goo[0], a fantastic indie game that was priced at $20, that has a 90 / 100 Metacritic score[1], that has absolutely no DRM is a game that had over 80% piracy rate at launch? The "People want to pay it's just the companies stopping them" arg…

And so are you suggesting that if it had DRM it wouldn't have seen such a high piracy rate? The fact is, there's going to be some level of piracy no matter what you do. There will always be people out there who will obtain the game but would have never otherwise bought the game. There will always be people out there for whom $20 is a reasonable price and will gladly pay it to obtain the game. It's up to the game auth…

I don't read that as he feels morally superior, but even if he does it's only over pirates, not everyone

Re: I pirated Game of Thrones season premiere

#57

Post by citricsquid »

PeterisP wrote: post #37
citricsquid wrote: post #13

People have always been, and always will be, willing to pay for good products. We have always understood Return on Investment, even if we don’t call it that. Which is why World Of Goo[0], a fantastic indie game that was priced at $20, that has a 90 / 100 Metacritic score[1], that has absolutely no DRM is a game that had over 80% piracy rate at launch? The "People want to pay it's just the companies stopping them" arg…

Who cares about % of piracy? The only value that matters is the absolute number of sales, not what the non-customers did or didn't do with that game. DRM hurts sales of many products. If one more extra customer pays for your movie because the DRM-free service is better, then it outweighs a billion of freeloaders.

The percentage of piracy demonstrates that there is a demand for the product but the consumers don't want to pay for it. World of Goo is the example I used because it's a "perfect" product under the check list provided in the article: great product (90/100) affordable ($20 for a game that takes >10 hours to complete) same price in all markets, unrestricted, same availability everywhere.

Re: I pirated Game of Thrones season premiere

#58

Post by arjunnarayan »

Samuel_Michon wrote: post #11

I agree with all of sentiments in the blog post but this: “Why should almost 40% of my time be taken up by adverts for something I am ALREADY paying for?” Your cable subscription is a partial payment for viewing the shows. It's works in the same way as buying a newspaper or magazine: the revenues from newsstand sales are a fraction of what it costs to create and distribute the publication. The rest is paid through ad…

The point is moot when it comes to Game of Thrones. HBO is an advertisement free channel.

Re: I pirated Game of Thrones season premiere

#59

Post by i_cannot_hack »

pc86 wrote: post #43
marknutter wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And so are you suggesting that if it had DRM it wouldn't have seen such a high piracy rate? The fact is, there's going to be some level of piracy no matter what you do. There will always be people out there who will obtain the game but would have never otherwise bought the game. There will always be people out there for whom $20 is a reasonable price and will gladly pay it to obtain the game. It's up to the game auth…

Does 80% really qualify as "some level of piracy?" Clearly there is a group of people who will always pirate what they want, regardless of the price or what it is (movies, TV shows, games, Photoshop). If that's the case, then I think it's also fair to say that there is a certain group of people for whom even the smallest bit of DRM would cause them to either go without the movie/show/program (I think the most likely)…

    > even the smallest bit of DRM would cause them to [...] 
    > go without the movie/show/program (I think the most likely)
And this would benefit the producer how? It would only serve to reduce the userbase, and thereby dampening the word-of-mouth spread and the perceived popularity the game, thus harming the sales of the product.

Of course, it those people bought the game instead, it could make up for it. But you said it was the less likely scenario.

Re: I pirated Game of Thrones season premiere

#60

Post by crusso »

Swizec wrote: post #8

I pay for HBO and they would have aired Game of Thrones on Monday evening this week. A day later than in the US, which is fine by me. But I was on a plane at that time and I have boxing practice when GoT airs anyway. So I shamelessly pirated the episode while at the airport (when did airport hotspots become 3.5MB/s monsters anyway?) intending to watch it on my laptop while flying over the atlantic. I ended up watchin…

Exactly. You've paid for the content but simply changed the way you receive it. Ethically, I think you're on pretty strong grounds.

It's unfortunate that folks like us who would like to be able to do common sense things with content are caught in a war between extremists on both sides. We have the rabid content creators and protectors suing everyone for every infraction and corrupting our legal system in the process - then we have the piracy zealots who feel no compunction with having an artist make zero from creating a great deal of desirable content because "information/data should be free".

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