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Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?

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Re: Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like, don’t pay until they curtail their segmentation of content across myriad of services, each adding n number of dollars and mental overhead of automatically renewing subscriptions bundled with certain must-pay-on-delivery for certain content that’s not available any other way. We see their model, we need to stop the growth of it.

if you don't find value don't consume or purchase it and it will stop growing. it grows because people pay. piracy is a strange rationalization

Piracy got us the accessible model we have today. It was a positive force. If it didn’t exist, don’t be shocked if these publishers would have sold you a Blu-ray with a digital code that expires for the digital version.

Re: Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?

#242
The day Disney+ launched, I bought a Usenet subscription. I've since cancelled Netflix, because they kept removing shows as I was watching them, then kept increasing the price, and finally added advertisements. I've stuck with Ad-free Hulu, because my kids watch a lot of shows on it, and it's been working very well. I tried Paramount+, but it doesn't work if you have a Pi-Hole, it just refuses to play anything unless you allow ads, no matter what level you pay for. Not for me.

Piracy isn't perfect, but it never shows me ads, never removes shows, and doesn't try to recommend anything to me.

Re: Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?

#243

The only 3 platforms that receive my money are Bandcamp, Itch.io and Steam. The first two are pristine from an ethical standpoint. I'm torn on Steam because it's not run as a typical USA corporation with all the anti consumer BS. The DRM they themselves provide is more of a suggestion instead of a real challenge. It can be broken with off the shelf tools or just stepping and dumping in x64dbg. However they did their…

> halfway through reversing the license checks I started feeling bad for the developers What do you mean by this? Is there a story I'm missing?

Not much story. The wasm binary crahsed wabt (lol) so after getting frustrated with the state of the chromium tooling for wasm, I switched to messing with the android build.

That one was super easy to deal with because it had symbols. Judging by the license routines, they initally intended it to be a subscription service, only to give it an actually fair price down the road ($15). Seeing the username of the dev in the build metadata also made me feel a bit bad for him.

Re: Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?

#244

The only 3 platforms that receive my money are Bandcamp, Itch.io and Steam. The first two are pristine from an ethical standpoint. I'm torn on Steam because it's not run as a typical USA corporation with all the anti consumer BS. The DRM they themselves provide is more of a suggestion instead of a real challenge. It can be broken with off the shelf tools or just stepping and dumping in x64dbg. However they did their…

> halfway through reversing the license checks I started feeling bad for the developers What do you mean by this? Is there a story I'm missing?

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?

#245

The only 3 platforms that receive my money are Bandcamp, Itch.io and Steam. The first two are pristine from an ethical standpoint. I'm torn on Steam because it's not run as a typical USA corporation with all the anti consumer BS. The DRM they themselves provide is more of a suggestion instead of a real challenge. It can be broken with off the shelf tools or just stepping and dumping in x64dbg. However they did their…

I approve of Steam's commitment to Linux and they have a great track record. I also will never pirate an exectuable file.

Re: Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?

#246

> I just feel like if we’re at peak monetization. We're really not. If anything there's more content (for lack of a better word) available for token amounts of money than there ever has been. I don't know how old you are but back in the distant past of the 90s you had two choices if you wanted to watch a film, you could go to a shop and buy a copy, probably for more money than you'd pay for a monthly Netflix subscrip…

Owning a physical copy of a movie hasn't gotten any cheaper since the 90s. A Top Gun Maverick blu-ray is $25. Netflix streaming has gone up in price significantly from debut and has a worse content library, due to "the streaming wars." Streaming access is not fair to compare to ownership --it's closer to rental, but without any of the supply-side cost of making and distributing physical media, so value to consumers should be better, based on that. The subscription services aim to lock in some or all of your entertainment budget to maximize per capita revenue month to month. If you want access to the full gamut you need to pay 5+ different ways and end up spending more than what's reasonable for a month full of viewing content (with next to no distribution cost.) IMO, it's only a good deal then if you're spending absurd an amount of time streaming, and there probably isn't enough good content to keep you busy. Quantity and variety of niche shows/films available has gone up over the years, but you can definitely argue quality has gone down apart from format fidelity and CGI quality.

Games haven't really gone down in price either, and now since so many of the games themselves are "live service" things, many of them expire after a few years when they turn the servers off. $25 cosmetic "virtual goods" are often sold in game, representing an absurd markup on the time of artists. You get manipulated/harassed to spend (maybe more like burn) money in them, often after having spent $40-70 to get in the front door.

Monetization is awful, and that shouldn't be too surprising. Businesses endeavor to extract what the market can bear most profitably, and to have a bigger piece of that pie, not so much to give the benefit of progress to the people paying.

Re: Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?

#247
I don't pirate things anymore. I subscribe to Spotify Premium for music. For movies/shows I subscribe to Netflix/Disney+ when there's something I want to watch and after a couple of weeks/months I unsubscribe when I'm done. If you can't afford 12$ or whatever it is for a Netflix subscription, I think you have other problems.

Re: Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?

#249
post #24

It depends. Games and music - no, I'm glad to pay for Spotify subscription, and I'm happy to buy a game every once in a while. Movies and TV shows - yes, if I cannot find them in Netflix. Sometimes I want to watch something, and it's not available in Netflix in my region, or not on Netflix at all. What choices do I have?

I usually choose not to watch.And not because of morals, but because the life is sad when so much effort goes into consuming content.

I usually just use yt-dlp for most things I want, how is one command a sad amount of effort? A ton of older cartoons I want to watch just sit on archive.org.

Re: Ask HN: How many of you are open to Piracy again?

#250
This got really really complex these days. I subscribes to HBO Max but sometimes the connections to their server are so bad, the catalog page don’t even load, in case like these I will have no choice but to find some pirated sources and load them to my device. Netflix / YouTube doesn’t have these kinds of problems though.

I would say the dollars are for the smooth experiences, you have to make it worth the dollar; otherwise I have no choice but piracy.

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