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Valve: Piracy Is More About Convenience Than Price

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Re: Valve: Piracy Is More About Convenience Than Price

#101

Post by corin_ »

zbisch wrote: post #92
nhangen wrote: post #90

I pay for DirectTV, Verizion FIOS, Netflix, and have an Apple TV, yet I still can't get content delivered how I want it. The only thing the big networks get right is sports. If I forget to record something, I have to go to Hulu, where I can't stream it to my TV in HD unless I buy another device. My alternative is to pay 99 cents (or more) on iTunes. I also have to buy a switch so I don't run out of HDMI ports, and it…

I don't mean to sound critical but why do you think networks get sports right? I actually feel like this is one of the worst offenders. Say I want to watch every Chicago Blackhawks game this season (or any other hockey team). Well, then I need to sign up for Versus. In order to get that I need to sign up for a Cable/satellite service. But I don't want all the channels, I watch what I want on broadcast or rent/stream.…

Living in the UK means I don't have to put up with blackouts, so ignoring that I can say that options for watching US sports are immense compared to what we have in Europe.

The fact that I can pay a hundred bucks and watch any MLB game live or on delay, on my PC, iPad or TV, in HD, with pausing, skipping to inning or batter, picture in picture, and more... that's mind-blowing for me.

Re: Valve: Piracy Is More About Convenience Than Price

#102

Post by tonio09 »

towelrod wrote: post #69
rick888 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so, you need to give them everything for free at the fastest bandwidth possible. The only way to stop piracy is: 1) give all of your stuff out for free 2) have a service that can't be pirated The reason big companies don't want piracy to become mainstream is because at a certain point, it becomes part of culture and "normal" to just pirate something, which means they won't be able to charge money for it (everyone wil…

People have spent billions of dollars buying music on iTunes. Its pretty obvious that people will pay for things if its more convenient than pirating it.

I wouldn't say it's more convenient. It's rather the case that most people have no clue about how to pirate music. It's an information asymmetry. You need to be at least minimally technically skilled to pirate.

Once you install an extension to chrome, it's actually easier to just go to youtube, search for a song, and click the download link. In iTunes, you have to set up a credit card, you can't copy the songs to any device, only works with iPhone ... etc. There are lots of inconveniences.

Re: Valve: Piracy Is More About Convenience Than Price

#103

Post by henrikschroder »

rick888 wrote: post #59
politician wrote: post #2

TLDR: "The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates," Gabe Newell said.

so, you need to give them everything for free at the fastest bandwidth possible. The only way to stop piracy is: 1) give all of your stuff out for free 2) have a service that can't be pirated The reason big companies don't want piracy to become mainstream is because at a certain point, it becomes part of culture and "normal" to just pirate something, which means they won't be able to charge money for it (everyone wil…

> Yet, people still pirate music.

Do they really?

I remember 15 years ago when a lot of my friends started building mp3 libraries, ripping the CDs they had, and downloaded huge amounts of music.

Now, none of my friends have their libraries anymore, or care about it at all. They use Spotify, or Last.fm, or something similar and never pirate music, because it's simply too much work to do it, compared to just searching for exactly what they want in some paid service.

Re: Valve: Piracy Is More About Convenience Than Price

#104

Post by beseku »

peng wrote: post #100
beseku wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a massive sticking point for me as an Englishman living in Japan. The huge delay in getting films and, especially, TV over here coupled with the IP address and other restrictions in place by certain providers is a huge encouragement to me to Bittorrent instead. Luckily I now have a UK and US iTunes account that serves me well for most things. My biggest gripe is with the UK sports companies - a lot of America…

Have you tried using UK and US-based VPNs to get through to the region-locked content? I've spent a couple months in China with a California-based VPS, and I'm able to SSH tunnel to watch everything I want on Hulu.

I;ve tried, with some success. This kinda makes my point though, using shady means to download content because I am of one nationality and living abroad - not exactly an edge case.

Re: Valve: Piracy Is More About Convenience Than Price

#105

Post by bad_user »

rick888 wrote: post #59
politician wrote: post #2

TLDR: "The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates," Gabe Newell said.

so, you need to give them everything for free at the fastest bandwidth possible. The only way to stop piracy is: 1) give all of your stuff out for free 2) have a service that can't be pirated The reason big companies don't want piracy to become mainstream is because at a certain point, it becomes part of culture and "normal" to just pirate something, which means they won't be able to charge money for it (everyone wil…

     Yet, people still pirate music.
I pirate music from time to time, because (1) I can't find the albums I want from my country on iTunes or similar and (2) wages are lower where I live, and these services are still too expensive. Both issues are fixable however.

It's also the case that some people will always pirate stuff -- but does it really matter when the market got a lot bigger? To me it's really not an issue of price -- BUT I do refuse paying for crappy content or for content that's too expensive relative to my monthly revenue.

The biggest problems with the movies/music industries for example is not piracy, but crappy content. For instance I go watch movies at my local movie theater, and I regret paying for 25% of all movies I'm seeing, even though I'm pretty selective about it. That's just sad.

    Nobody wants to spend their hard-earned money 
    on something they can just as easily get for free.
This is true, but the MP3 file itself is not the only thing you're paying for when using iTunes or similar.

Other things would be convenience (searching for stuff on PirateBay is totally not fun), free online backup (100 GB on DropBox is $20 / month - and with my current needs, I would need 3 times that storage and constantly growing) and the insurance that you're buying quality.

You see, even if people prefer Free all the time, people also think that quality reflects directly in the price paid. That's why people still buy Nike shoes, even though there are hundreds of brands producing cheaper clones with reasonable quality.

And back to searching on PirateBay, I can't count the number of times I downloaded something, only to find that it was not what I wanted or that it was of poor quality. Sometimes whole hours would pass until I found something that I liked, or until I gave up.

And that's the thing -- some people will always pirate, but other people will prefer buying if it is more convenient. And yet other people have this feeling of accomplishment when rewarding authors that they like (me included) ... like 2 days ago I bought a copy of an ebook called "The Making of Prince of Persia", even though you can find the whole book in the author's blog.

Re: Valve: Piracy Is More About Convenience Than Price

#106

Post by nickolai »

wccrawford wrote: post #4
politician wrote: post #2

TLDR: "The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates," Gabe Newell said.

But it should be noted that Steam's pre-release anti-piracy has no yet been broken. So it's not like they don't do DRM... Having said that, the conclusion is pretty much in line with what many gamers and pirates have been saying: Stop screwing the customer and creating pirates of them. I'm lucky enough to live in an English-speaking country, but I'm sure that if I lived in a country that typically sees long delays be…

>I'm lucky enough to live in an English-speaking country, but I'm sure that if I lived in a country that typically sees long delays before localization, I'd find a way to get it early. Even if that meant learning English and engaging in piracy.

Add to this that the translations are often very badly broken - my eyes and ears bleed when I play French versions of games. I actually prefer to get the english version through Steam, and I am sure a sizeable fraction of players would agree.

The only successful localization ive seen to date is stracraft2 - so good that I didnt even bother redownloading the english version from Blizzard. Admittedly i havent even been checking out most localized versions for a while - so it may have been improving lately without me noticing.

Re: Valve: Piracy Is More About Convenience Than Price

#107

Post by tjoff »

w1ntermute wrote: post #33
wccrawford wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it should be noted that Steam's pre-release anti-piracy has no yet been broken. So it's not like they don't do DRM... Having said that, the conclusion is pretty much in line with what many gamers and pirates have been saying: Stop screwing the customer and creating pirates of them. I'm lucky enough to live in an English-speaking country, but I'm sure that if I lived in a country that typically sees long delays be…

> I'm lucky enough to live in an English-speaking country, but I'm sure that if I lived in a country that typically sees long delays before localization, I'd find a way to get it early. Localization isn't just bureaucratic nonsense that was conjured up to aggravate gamers in foreign countries - the games actually need to be translated to the local language. As for if you were living in one of those countries as an ex…

the games actually need to be translated to the local language.

Uh. No.

Also, most games are not translated at all.

Re: Valve: Piracy Is More About Convenience Than Price

#108

Post by seabee »

jamesgeck0 wrote: post #16
DanielStraight wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EDIT: It was rightly pointed out that I directed my comments to music whereas the topic was games. My thoughts drifted due to the more common association with piracy. Everything I said still applies though. To have a fair discussion, we need to be clear on who is screwing whom and how. And we need to be clear on how they can stop, and whether it is actually within their power to stop. Original post follows: Who shoul…

But we're not talking about music piracy. :) Steam is missing a few major titles (mostly from EA and Blizzard), but it's one of the most complete digital download services. It also seems to be rather indie friendly.

Steam missing EA's titles is a recent development caused by EA starting their own competitor, Origin.

It remains to be seen whether Origin can gain any traction as a (currently) single publisher platform, but it is required by their new releases, just like Steam back at Half-Life 2's release.

Re: Valve: Piracy Is More About Convenience Than Price

#109

Post by GreenNight »

kelnage wrote: post #46
w1ntermute wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm lucky enough to live in an English-speaking country, but I'm sure that if I lived in a country that typically sees long delays before localization, I'd find a way to get it early. Localization isn't just bureaucratic nonsense that was conjured up to aggravate gamers in foreign countries - the games actually need to be translated to the local language. As for if you were living in one of those countries as an ex…

But yet they pirate the games anyway. My guess is that you'll find that a large percentage of "gamers" in non-English speaking countries speak English well enough to understand most games and don't want to wait the 6+ months required to translate the game to their local tongue when they could be playing online against US players. This was especially true a few years back, when some publishers wouldn't release games i…

It depends. A shooter? Yeah, piece of cake. An RPG? Sorry, but depending on the country no that many people could understand it well enough to follow the story.

TV Series do get around the moment they get on a torrent site, but many many people can follow them thanks to the subtitles provided by fellow viewers. If not they would have a harder time following them.

Re: Valve: Piracy Is More About Convenience Than Price

#110

Post by Derbasti »

wccrawford wrote: post #4
politician wrote: post #2

TLDR: "The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates," Gabe Newell said.

But it should be noted that Steam's pre-release anti-piracy has no yet been broken. So it's not like they don't do DRM... Having said that, the conclusion is pretty much in line with what many gamers and pirates have been saying: Stop screwing the customer and creating pirates of them. I'm lucky enough to live in an English-speaking country, but I'm sure that if I lived in a country that typically sees long delays be…

> I'm lucky enough to live in an English-speaking country, but I'm sure that if I lived in a country that typically sees long delays before localization, I'd find a way to get it early. Even if that meant learning English and engaging in piracy.

Translations are often bad and delayed. This is as true for games as it is true for movies or books. I hate it. The obvious solution is to just get the english versions.

But the worst thing is, there is often no legal or practical way to get the english version. Books are easy. You can get just about any english book through Amazon (.de, .fr, .etc). Movies are somewhat bad. DVDs usually include english language. iTunes doesn't feature (many) english movies, but Ebay sells US iTunes gift cards. Games are actually really hard. It is possible to order from Amazon UK or Amazon US, but shipping will be weeks and there is a good chance you will have to pay customs. Steam requires a VPN and a foreign account and a credit card proxy (Entropay works fine). Not what you would call convenient.

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