alt Hacker NewsI saw in a YouTube video once, and I'll paraphrase because I forgot, something that resonated well with me about piracy.
They said piracy is never about cost, but almost always about a service issue. Basically people flocked to Napster (and the likes) at the time because it let them browse an infinitude of music which was, back then, incredible.
That was just market demand validation, a latent problem waiting for a solution to address it. Piracy just did it first. Once someone solved it, a little bit better, like Spotify did with realtime (instead of p2p waiting), and with indexing/filtering/curation/etc. It automatically won over piracy.
Then, the one fun argument it brought after, is that the same tools that ended piracy are likely the ones making it rise again. Netflix made everyone happy, but now we have a subscription circus. There's N streaming services, and keeping up with subscribing/cancelling/finding the one that has your content created a ... service problem!
So we're bound to see piracy rise again, not because folks don't want to pay $20/mo for streaming, but because they don't want to deal with the hassle of jumping across N subscriptions and keeping track of that.
I think some of the big media is trying to solve for that, which is why you see all of them now becoming "channels" inside each other, but I'm curious to see how this will evolve.
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Doesn’t really explain why piracy rates are much lower in Japan compared to other countries. It is mostly a cultural issue, and a lot of people will go above and beyond to justify their actions.
Just to note, I’m not even that anti-piracy, but if something is not being sold, or conveniently provided, you can just… not get it?
I can teach pretty much any film I want for £3 through Apple tv. That’s the same price I paid at the video store in the 90s, Except inflation means it’s half the price in real terms and the quality is far higher.
Hell I rent films I own on blueray as diving through the cd wallets while the pizza goes good isn’t worth the saving.
I’m sure there are people for whom the main problem is keeping track of N streaming services.
But I’d wager the combined cost of those N services is a much, much bigger factor for most.
This may have been the origin of the quote you are remembering, from Gabe Newell in the context of Steam.
"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem..."
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/11676496-we-think-there-is-...