The solution to piracy is not taking measures to prevent it, but rather offering a product so pirating would seem like a terrible alternative. Take Spotify as a prime example.
When I was a kid I pirated music like it was no ones business. I didn't really stop until Spotify came to the US and signed up. For the price of $10/month, I could listen to all the music I ever wanted. Even though at that point I had a good system for pirating music, I pretty much gave up pirating music because Spotify was just so damn good.
Spotify in my eyes, rather than trying to stop music piracy, just started to compete with it.
I felt the same way about Netflix when it first started. Now, there are dozens of competitors with different catalogues, making piracy enticing for people once again.
Speaking as a consumer, that in itself doesn't make it enticing. If there was very little worthwhile content on 1-2 platforms, maybe, but since I'm not the "binging" type who absolutely needs to see every hyped show right now, I can't be arsed and find there's already enough to see.
Between Netflix and Prime, you're not spending that much and you sure as hell don't need a dozen subscriptions to watch every good show.
I think there are still enough people who remember 2010-era Starz on Netflix (and with the massive DVD catalogue for the rest). Everything, on every single service, has been downhill since then.
I'm the same as you. I subscribe to Netflix so long as there's something I'm watching, then stop. Then I might subscribe to something else. People that complain about having to pay for all services are just power users, and I think it's fair that I don't pay as much as them.
Whether a product can compete with piracy is also context-dependent.
$10 is a paltry sum in the US. But it is really high in third world countries.
$10 can give you one healthy meal each day for half a month in suburban Indian subcontinent. The price in rural areas is lesser.
Some companies get purchase power parity and can reflect it in their pricing, and some companies either can't or don't want to do this. Some companies don't even get it.
I know of Spotify Premium modded APKs being super famous in Eastern Europe, LatAm, and South Asia. I have no hard data, but people are so annoyed with Spotify ads, and as the price is too high for them, many choose to pirate the app instead.
You didn’t stop solely because of Spotify. You stopped because you had $10/month as an adult. If you were a kid today and didn’t have $10/month do you think you’d be pirating like nobody’s business?
Is adblock meaningfully different from piracy? I'm familiar with the defenses of adblocking and think they have some merit, but they seem trivially extensible to piracy as well.
The more salient comparison is between piracy and spotify (with or without ads)
Adblock is not much different than getting up from the couch to make a sandwich or whatever when a commercial comes on TV. Some commercials still get through to you because you don't really need to get up and do something on every commercial break (or you can still hear them in the background). With Adblock, some ads still get through, plus in-stream product placements.
BTW, I never really bothered with adblockers until I started getting random malware infections from ads (I'd google search for some info, land on a random discussion forum, and a couple times a month my computer would immediately get infected from ads that had 0-day javascript sandbox escape exploits -- hasn't happened since I started using an adblocker) Oh, and a couple times that I left my web browser open on a page, and sometime in the middle of the night a video ad would start up blasting through the speakers. Yeah, that there drove me to using an ad blocker too.
> Adblock is not much different than getting up from the couch to make a sandwich or whatever when a commercial comes on TV.
Sure, but this type of argument-by-example is an easy way to hide both t holes in one's argument[1] and the similarities to piracy. It's also trivially extensible: "Piracy is not much different from streaming a show at a friend's house", in that somebody who had access to the media is sharing it with you.
To be clear, I've heard the principled theoretical argument for adblocking being ethical, and think it has at least some merit. I just don't understand the claim that piracy is meaningfully different. The assumptions required to consider adblocking ethical provide the same shield to piracy.
Piracy is illegal not because it is unethical, but because at some point in history some creators got rich enough to attempt to protect their profits through legislation. The action itself, the copying of information, is morally neutral. It's only illegal because, in theory, it precludes someone from making money from that copying. But that's nonsense, because by that standard it should also be illegal to not pirate and not purchase the copy.
I'm saying that in the context of this thread, saying "I wouldn't be pirating in that case, I'd be using YT with adblock" isn't very meaningful because using YT with adblock is equivalent to piracy from multiple relevant perspectives, including ethically[1] and economically. The legal perspective is not an especially relevant one to this thread, since the baseline was already being comfortable enough with the level of legal threat to pirate regularly.
[1] including the belief that both are ethically acceptable. Just clarifying again, because people seem to be reading a lot of implicit claims/value judgments into my comments that are not in there
Piracy, whether torrenting or finding some other site to download files and then manage them, are a lot more hassle than simply streaming from YouTube.
There’s also plenty of YouTube videos that are basically entire albums in one. One can listen to that copyright infringing content too without even bothering to enable AdBlock. Really for all of your considerations on the legal implications, UX is king and the really the only major factor after the economic, for the end-user.
You're right, but I guess we both made the same mistake in different directions. slothtrop said
>Likely [I wouldn't pirate]. Probably I'd use YT with adblock or stream on bandcamp.
You assumed they wouldn't pirate because it's unethical, and I assumed they wouldn't do it because it's illegal. The actual reason could be entirely different.
Ah I was speaking ethically, not legally. Of course, adblocking isn't illegal and piracy nominally is.
As mentioned in the sibling comment, this argument-by-example is trivially extensible to piracy. "It's not unethical to watch media at a friend's house. Piracy is just using a machine to do this via a digital encoding instead of an analog one"
If I were a kid, I'd ask my parents to switch to a family plan, and negotiate how I can help with home chores in exchange for those extra $6/month. (Of course, very few kids actually think this way.)
I never stopped pirating for the same reason - Spotify doesn't carry the music I listen to. Anything slightly mainstream, sure. Underground?? They don't have anything.
Yeah, I feel like it's actually the opposite. You use Spotify/random music service to find the niche music because you couldn't find it on torrent/napster/kazaa/etc.
Why do you think Epic would want to close down Bandcamp? They are not in competition. Sure they may well pivot it away from what makes it desirable now, but I can't see them closing it down any time soon.
Large Companies like Epic don't by smaller companies like Bandcamp because they want the revenue stream that comes in from Bandcamp. They want the technology, engineers (acqi-hiring), data, or to kill possible competition. Keeping Bandcamp operating would take away from their main reasons from buying them. My personal guess is they want the technology + engineers for some new feature set they want. They won't want any bad press + they need time for planning/organizing before actually doing anything.
And the "launcher wars" are finally dying down, with companies capitulating to Steam, preventing the backslide into piracy-as-more-convenient that streaming platforms are having.
Have they? I don't PC game much outside of maybe Fortnite, Halo, and now Overwatch. That's three launchers right there.
I can technically add overwatch as a game in steam but if there's ever an update for overwatch it silently breaks (spins on login) until I realize I have to open battle.net to update the game.
Microsoft (Xbox app) doesn't even allow you to access raw game files and executables without a lot of work and I don't even know a good solution today. You can make a launcher shortcut but it's just to the Xbox app with a parameter selecting the game. This does not work to add a custom game in steam. I do know they just changed functionality in this area so may be different now.
But it's not the cut from the middleman that's gone down as a result (in fact there's whole new layers of middlemen), rather the variety of artists making a living wage from industry contracts. "Working musicians" are dying off; you're either a superstar, or you're living on ramen or doing it as a side gig. Overall the result is pretty bad for a society which values professional artists.
"Spotify in my eyes, rather than trying to stop music piracy, just started to compete with it." - I would extrapolate that Spotify (streaming services) went a step further than Piracy, by absolving the consumers of any guilt or wish to buy music directly from the artists. A far better model in every front.. unless you're the artist (not signed to a major label).
Even as a kid, if you can't afford $10 a month, you're doing something wrong.
I remember a young boy, around age 10, who would go around the neighborhood offering to take people's trash to the road on Sunday for disposal on Monday mornings. All he asked was that you open your garage door by 6 p.m. so he could come around and pull your bins to the curb. He charged $5 a month.
Some of you may be thinking, "Wow, you're so lazy you can't even take your own trash to the road?"
Well I could... but for less per day than I spend on Diet Coke, I can get it done for me every month without having to worry about it and all I had to do was program my garage door to open at 6 p.m. on Sunday and close at 9 p.m.
About half the people in our neighborhood took up this lad on his offer, so he had to have been making around $200 a month or so. Not too shabby for a 10 year old boy.
It's not difficult to make money. You just offer a service doing things most people don't want to do.
It's still a normal thing in high trust societies/neighborhoods. Might be worth figuring out how more trust can be developed if that's not a normal thing.
>Even as a kid, if you can't afford $10 a month, you're doing something wrong.
As a kid I didn't pay for stuff mostly because it didn't have a payment method that I'd be able to use
I used premium SMS (which were something like 3 times more expensive than direct transfer)
and later I used paysafe cards that you could purchase in local shops or I started using "forms" and sending them via post office or bank branches IIRC
"That does not necessarily mean that piracy has no effect but only that the statistical analysis does not prove with sufficient reliability that there is an effect. An exception is the displacement of recent top films. The results show a displacement rate of 40 per cent which means that for every ten recent top films watched illegally, four fewer films are consumed legally"
The article also mentions that piracy did not have much effect in legal consumption of books, music, and games. People felt that prices were "fairer" in these media. Games piracy even led to people buying more games than what they would have bought without piracy.
People felt that piracy in movies and TV is justified because the price is too high.
But that would clearly be wrong. Games companies have been reliably investing in DRM for 30 years and it's not because they're all idiots. Occasionally executives talk about this. Piracy rates for PC games without DRM can approach 95% and they can see in their sales curves the huge drop that occurs when a working crack is released. For a large enough game with a stable and predictable enough sales curve, it's easy to work out lost sales, because the curves start high and rapidly decay to zero in any case.
That's why people outside the industry often think game copy protection doesn't work. They judge it by a standard of "it is never ever cracked" which games companies don't care about. Most sales are within the first 3 months or so. After that it dwindles and after 6 months it's become long tail; the studio has moved on unless it's an indie shop that plans to work on the same game for years. If a copy protection lasts 3-4 months it's ideal, if it lasts a year it means they put too much effort into it and could have made more money by making a faster but weaker protection. The resulting equilibrium is thus frequently mis-understood as "failure" by armchair studio executives.
Always great when the headline is contradicted by the body of the article, especially in this social media age in which people mostly read headlines and move on. It is especially funny in this instance in which the article also says "The European Commission was quite happy to publish partial results that fitted with its agenda". That is exactly what Techdirt did here by only focusing on the part of the study that confirmed "exactly what Techdirt has been saying for years".
Piracy is mostly conducted by teens and young adults who don't have the captial to buy whatever they are pirating.
After people grow up a bit and start making money they usually also pick up other hobbies (which they couldn't participate for lack of funding previously) which cuts into their pirated media consumption and on top of that now they can afford to buy said media and now with streaming platforms it is easier than ever just to pay a small monthy fee and get access to quite large pool of media (even though video streaming services are doing their best to ruin this).
For me now days there aren't many reasons to pirate stuff because everything is available from streaming services, I just subscribe for a month to watch whatever movie/series I'm after. With games, most new titles are single player games which I don't care at all about and multiplayer games are either cheap or free. And Spotify handles music very well.
I do wonder the effect it has on "total leisure time spend". My hypothesis is that piracy drops total spend in dollars, but maybe not necessarily on the category that was pirated. This would fit and counter the oft-claimed "if I couldn't pirate this I wouldn't have bought it anyway, so it's not a lost sale".
I hypothese there would be two reasons:
- because piracy enables more consumption of some media than the person otherwise would have done, it means they have less leisure time available to spend on other media which they would have spent money on. E.g. instead of buying a book and reading it, they would watch a low-value movie they pirated, affecting book sales but not movie sales
- because piracy decreases the perceived value of an hour of entertainment, the person would be less willing to spend money in other categories as well and would rather fall back to cheaper options
The result would be that the amount a person spends on _total_ entertainment drops, but the drop would be in other categories than the category that is piratable.
> My hypothesis is that piracy drops total spend in dollars
My hypothesis is the exact opposite. I think that piracy increases total spend in dollars.
With piracy, people get to experience things for free that they otherwise wouldn't have. This opens individuals to newer media, newer niches, newer genres, and so on.
I have known a few people who spent their money for the first time on video games after playing the pirated version of GTA V. They wouldn't have spent a dime on games if they hadn't played pirated GTA V.
I turned into a subscriber after watching The Wire, The Sporanos, and Breaking Bad with a shared password (also a kind of piracy). I would have never even thought of paying for TV if I could not watch The Wire for free.
I believe that pirated content "converts" people into web series watchers, gamers, and more.
Microsoft is fully aware of Windows piracy. Had Microsoft cracked down, then they would have lost tens of millions of future paying customers.
Many people pay for Office for their business because that is what they have used since their childhood- in a legal way or not.
Conversely, maybe the amount income people have to spend on entertainment is a function of their disposable income, so fixed by the persons financial circumstances rather than entertainment costs. i.e. if you got $20 bucks spare and a movie is $20 you watch one, if they are $10 you watch 2.
Over simplified, but I think an important point, that entertainment fits into the budget of 'disposable' income rather than essential.
Piracy affects smaller companies far more than large ones, and that's where the discussion gets muddied.
In my view we don't talk about product protection enough, and instead resort to dunking on DRM all the time. Instead of talking about DRM and how it is legitimately problematic I'd like to highlight that we can protect products without DRM and still sell them - it's why products have gone to online accounts for seemingly offline software.
Of course this can be broken, the same as DRM, but done right online features can become a core part of a software and make it so offline patches remove a significant enough amount of feature that it's not worth it.
It is sadly a natural order of things. In my experience when I was younger I legitimately could not have gotten into graphic design and learned enough about it without the big name products. The pricing for something like adobe has become so far outside of reason that people will pay for the crack rather than the subscription as an example.
I think it's pretty impactful but people don't like to talk about it or even think about it explicitly. Rather, what people observe is that the really rich companies seem to mostly make their money by selling online services or like Apple, by selling hardware. As the latter is very difficult and often unjustifiable for what could be a pure software solution, people just come to associate cloud service=success and it the underlying factors become under-analyzed.
I think they also realize that whilst geeks will kick up a stink about "DRM" when it's done client side, the exact same thing implemented by a firewall and server rules draws no attention. So it's seen as more socially respectable, although in reality of course, software+DRM gives much better privacy than a cloud service ever can.
In reality of course, lots of very rich companies make offline or mostly offline software. Microsoft, Oracle, SAP etc. But they're unfashionable.
Not necessarily. Jailbroken device is needed to produce decrypted dump which is packaged back into an application file. This file then can be signed with a third party service using either an enterprise account or the personal user account (in which case it must be re-signed periodically).
I think that’s a major thing - piracy of Disney or Adobe may be minor, but piracy of a small app could entirely destroy it. Especially one in a targeted niche.
Out of curiosity, what was the product? Was it targeted at home/personal users or business users? I would expect piracy to be less of a problem for products targeted at business use, where occasional piracy by home users is less of a problem as they usually wouldn't be able to afford/justify paying for the software anyway (piracy might help in these cases - training people that will then become paying users in the future).
Looks to be a DVR remote app aimed at home consumers. Was going to call BS on the post originally, but the app was from the 2008/2009 era, which makes way more sense (nowhere near enough people are jailbroken for this to happen nowadays). Kinda BM to leave out that detail IMO.
Why is it problematic (BM?) to leave out that detail? It's irrelevant to the argument TechDirt is making, which is a general one.
All the date means is that when the iPhone platform had poorly implemented DRM, piracy rates could approach nearly 100% for some types of app. Since then Apple improved their DRM and nowadays iOS devs don't worry about piracy so much. Seems like a disproof of TechDirt's thesis.
Correct, that was the app. It did reasonably well and tanked to near-nothing when DRM was removed, and to full nothing when TiVo finally released their own.
I quit pirating years ago when I started being able to pay for things. Just speaking for myself, price matters a lot. Nowadays if things are overpriced I just don't use them. But I didn't used to have the luxury of deciding what to use. Often I was forced to use a specific tool (such as Photoshop). If it was priced well I would pay. If not, I would pirate. The only exception here was movies because I've always despised the unreliability and terrible user experience of optical media.
> Overall,the analysis indicates that for films and TV-series current prices are higher than 80 per cent of the illegal downloaders and streamers are willing to pay. For books, music and games prices are at a level broadly corresponding to the willingness to pay of illegal downloaders and streamers.
It would be interesting to know to what degree price is a factor in app piracy.
Piracy could be partially regarded as a pricing problem. If your album is priced at $1000 and you sell 3 albums and get 1000 pirated downloads and you focus on the 1000 people who didn't pay you then you are focusing on the wrong problem.
The important thing even more so than what price would have inspired the 1000 to pay you is the 10,000 who didn't even consider your product and what price would have changed that decision.
Thank you for sharing your experience. Studies like this may produce some general truth at large for a segment of a market, but they're hardly representative of reality.
I've also released software which was good enough that people wanted to pirate it. I think it's a lesson you don't have to learn once on your own: it's enough to hear other people's accounts.
0.4% of Iphones are jailbroken. Let us suppose that 50% of individuals with jailbroken phones who were prospective buyers decided to download it instead a fantastic unbelievable percentage. You would expect a 0.2% decrease in sales.
What you are describing is aprox 500x the effect. Your hypothesis is fantastic let me propose some alternatives.
- The same release that removed the DRM also introduced changes in the application which you didn't regard as in any way negative but which turned off users.
- You introduced changes in your price structure to account for the rampant piracy you expected and killed your sales.
- You in some way offended people and they decided to stop buying from you.
- You serve a niche and either saturated that niche, the portion of the niche that was interested in your solution, or the portion of the second group your advertising was reaching and sales dropped off
- You have an exposure problem. You experienced a positive but not permanent bounce that only coincided incidentally with removal of DRM
- Other players entered the same space diluting your market
Any of the above are more reasonable than supposing that all your users are jailbreakers.
No, I was similarly skeptical at first because modern jailbreaking is so rare. He’s telling a true story… but leaving off that his story was from the 2008/2009 era.
Maybe the actual story is about the rising competition from cable co provided DVRs in an excellent position to roll their hardware into the customers existing bill for a perceptively smaller fee compared to outright purchase of superior tivo hardware combined with increasing competition from streaming services.
User has understandably negative feelings about piracy and retroactive explains his misfortune based on it.
You're quite in denial here. User's story is true, and as he explained the effect was "overnight". You're trying to claim that an effect that happened instantly, the moment he removed the DRM, is to do with long term industry trends. But that wouldn't happen instantly.
It's pretty obvious that well implemented DRM works. If it didn't then it would have died out a long time ago. See how much effort the games console makers put in, despite it being a highly competitive market with extreme pricing pressure. Yet, they do compete on the quality of their DRM because game studies are responsive to it.
I was being kind and not disparaging the commenter. User is misrepresenting the truth.
1 out of 250 iphones is jailbroken and can even install pirated apps directly. On balance which is more likely that piracy killed his app overnight or netflix, competitors, and cable co DVRs did?
The alternative is to have us believe that nearly all his prospective users were in the 0.4% and instantly heard it on the grape vine that his app was fair game "overnight" instead of buying a $3 remote app. Does that seem even slightly credible?
It makes a better narrative than I bet my livelihood on a excellent entrant to a market that became crowded then went away.
If you do a search restricted to the time frame his product died you will note there were multiple competitors including a mobile interface m.tivo.com launched.
All those factors are plausible. If I can still get sales reports I will see if I can re-identify the dropoff and look for correlation.
I will say it certainly -felt- like removing the DRM was a mistake at the time, because the cliff was dramatic and immediate.
As others have pointed out this was a product in the 2009 era, and it did eventually get replaced by a first-party app from TiVo at which point I just shut it down.
It was an off-the-shelf jailbreak solution, and I sprinkled it in over 100 places in the code. I read people on jailbreak forums expressing frustration that my app was "too hard to crack and not worth it." Success!
But once it backfired and affected a single paying customer, I decided to change my course.
This is going to not be popular, but piracy has effect on sales. Ignore the US market for a bit, I know market in India for example has a real effect. In India piracy was rampant and it was leading to loss in sales. At one point folks used pirate movies, make them into CDs and sell them for 80 rupees each. This used to happen immediately after a movie was released. This was so widespread that these CDs were available everywhere and everyone with a CD burner would do and sell. The movie studios then adopted streaming immediately and now most movies are available very quickly after a release and so ease of availability at a higher quality made buying CDs a moot point, even for folks low on cash. It feels to me that the whole concept of DRM and freedom is mostly done from a US point of view where a dollar is nothing and people don't even pick up a dime or a quarter they find on the road.
I've never been to India, but I bought a decent number of pirated CDs and DVDs from people (including Indians) when I lived in Doha, Qatar in the mid 00s. They were cheap, but extremely unreliable in quality. Many of the discs simply didn't work, and of those that did, there was a good chance you were getting a "camcorder in the theatre" version complete with terrible picture, sound and people coughing. I did the math at one point and I spent more on piracy than if I'd just bought legit copies over the internet.
“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
1. Their shareholders would be happy. And the CEO will get attaboys from board members. Taking a tough stance on Piracy costs a CEO nothing. Anecdotes matter little, but I have seen in many cases, when gaming companies adopted new DRMs, people actually bought their shares. And not dumb people, too.
2. There are some assholes who don't want poor people having their things. Some do it for the image purpose. Think of Apple hardware. Older models can easily be sold at a much lower price. Save some very old iPhone SEs, they don't do that. If every Tom, Dick, and Harry owns something, it dilutes a product's value to many people. People want to own rare and exotic things.
They still don't like that people can pirate, whether or not in impacts their bottom line. Also because they're so vigilant about protect their IP, that's kind of an extension of the behavior
Nah it's about control. They want to kill piracy, mark my words what do you think Steam, denvuo, and other forms if account based drm are? They are going to build denuvo into the OS with future exe's so they can disable them like they got on consoles, aka if you mod or hack your Wii or xbox, new games force update the bios and communicate out over the wire to brick your machine if they detect modded console. They want to bring similar tech to the PC, windows 10 and window 11 is the beginning of trusted computing (you no longer own you pc) and honest plaintext binaries. They are changing how exe's function. UWP was a trial run. When you crack a UWP they only work on certain versions of windows.
This is a bad example because Steam's DRM is notoriously terrible and even multiplayer games that use Steam's multiplayer services can be played entirely without Steam with a particular open-source emulator (granted they don't also have their own servers that you connect to, which is an entirely different issue).
Windows 11 and TPM are definitely points towards most computing moving in the direction that Mac OS has. The thing to remember, though, is that most users don't actually care. They only care if your bog standard apps run.
>This is a bad example because Steam's DRM is notoriously terrible
You don't grasp Valve and the industry has already won any game where the networking code has been pulled out already acts like DRM, any client-server app requiring username and login accounts, or has some piece of code living on some remote server, means you no longer own your own stuff.
Valve and the rest of the computing industry is boiling you all slowly. AKA look at this list of games from crackwatch.
You'll notice more and more games are "online only". Diablo 3 is literally diablo 2 /w drm, they wanted to kill piracy.
Starcraft remastered, and reforged require internet to play, that means we've lost the battle. The public has eaten up client-server back ended games. You don't get that the whole point was to monopolize their own products and kill the local infinitely copyable binaries PC games used to be coded as, AKA PRe steam 99% of games were complete you got singleplayer+multiplayer inside the same game.
MMO's/F2P are literally just PC games with their multiplayer ripped out, don't think so? Listen to the ultima devs here, when Ultima online was successful, publishers and devs went over their entire PC game list to convert their local apps to client-server apps and stuck "MMO" on the front so they could steal PC games from the public.
EA killed ultima 9 when the UO beta got massive interest, that lead to the death of PC games as local applications, the industry from then on there was a massive war to back end all PC games, they couldn't immediately do that to quake and urneal because we'd been treated too good with Warcraft 1-3, Descent 1-3, Quake 1-3, and build engine games like Duke 3d. The entire industry has always wanted to kill piracy and Ultima online gave the entire industry the go ahead once they realized that many of our fellow programmers and gamers were irrationally stupid beyond their wildest dreams.
Anyone playing quake and Descent at the time fear the loss of dedicated servers and level editors which used to come with the games, we knew if Ultima online was successful that Publishers would want to back end every fucking PC game and that's the end of the personal computer and the return of IBM and mainframe computing.
"Signed exe's" and trusted computing is the return of mainframe computing of the 60's in new bullshit language but I don't expect the mmo/steam generation to do anything but froth at the mouth. When they were the ones killing gaming and gave birth to microtransactions.
You can't put MTX in diablo 1, warcraft 1-3, or starcraft 1 because they are local applications that run entirely from your pc. None of the code has been stolen out of the game carved back behind a user account and login requirement. Like with most PC games these days.
We're losing gaming history and generation mmo is to blame for their general cluelessness of the evil of mainframe computing.
Ummm...more and more games are forcing you to be online during play because, in reality, that's what people want. People want their universal auction houses that connect with other players and feel more "alive." People want their Wonder Trades and other seemingly inane social features. Do all games need it (eg. the StarCraft and WarCraft III remasters)? No, but that has less to do with "ONLINE GAMES ARE EVIL" and more to do with them wanting to keep people firmly in the Battle.net ecosystem. There's an entire player retention strategy that goes into that that has nothing to do with piracy.
Moreover, MMOs in general necessitate a central server. They're a completely different genre that is isolated from the fears you're expressing and, more to the point, they're not a particularly popular genre when compared to session-oriented competitive multiplayer games, so they're not actually why those games are forcing you to connect to a central server.
The main thing you're missing when complaining about the "loss of dedicated servers" is that centralized services consolidate the userbase, allow them to programmatically split the userbase by region, and ensure that, as long as people are playing, they can always be found. But, more importantly, you're never locked out of the "populated" servers for an arbitrary amount of time because they're perpetually full, which has been a problem in a number of games with dedicated servers.
Also, you have to remember that the games industry is approximately 5x larger (by revenue, probably more by userbase, especially considering the rise of f2p games and increasing prevalence of deep discounts) now than it was in 2000. What the majority wants inevitably changed because "the majority" changed purely by virtue of there are 5x+ more people with their own opinions.
So, sure, things are changing and are moving away from self-hosting, but there are a lot of cultural factors (and undeniable conveniences) that have influenced it far more than "companies are evil and they just want to control us."
> So we know the ability to have dedicated servers and in game server browser exists inside the engine.
You can continue to spout conspiracy theories if you want, but the fact of the matter is that dedicated servers are a completely different archetype. If you connect to a server, your connection is retained until you disconnect, meaning that you are in the player pool until you disconnect, which means no one else can take your slot in the player pool until you disconnect. This worked when communities were smaller, but it's completely incompatible with having 100k+ people online at any one time. The server lists would be massive, especially in a game like Halo Infinite, where lobbies cap at 16. No one wants to deal with that.
> Sigh, go listen to the post mortem devs of ultima online, as soon as UO beta was successful, Ultima 9 (the local app) was axed, for client-server ultima, aka "MMO's" are just back ended rpgs, they re not some different kind of game.
Ultima IX was, from the ground up, awful. Not to mention, you're completely misrepresenting this. It's not like they killed Ultima IX and reused its code in Ultima Online. They're completely different games.
And yes, MMOs are different. They literally have different mechanics. No Ultima game played like Ultima Online except Ultima Online. The entire appeal is that the entire userbase is all on one server.
But, more importantly, at any given time, the servers are too complex to manage for individuals and, at the time that Ultima Online was released, it would have been literally impossible to run on the average desktop computer. A RasPi can barely manage 8 people on a Minecraft server. You think that your 1997 Pentium could have managed Ultima's server? Alternatively, look at Ryzom's open-source release. There are like four different interconnected servers. What average user is going to be able to adequately manage that for other users?
I literally didn't say the network code was different. But server load, internet requirements (have fun hosting an Ultima Online server for your friends on a 56K modem), and more make it impractical for any single user to host a server.
Quake II is literally not the same as an MMO. You have a small map with a maximum of, what, 32 players? MMOs can have thousands. Most modern MMOs can handle hundreds in the same zone before they become unplayably laggy. Most can't handle thousands in one zone, even on the machines the servers were built for. You can't do that as a consumer.
It's not about the code. It's about the game itself and its requirements.
Emulating servers doesn't change that.
Again, it's all about being able to connect everyone that is playing and the difficult parts being managed for you. You never have to worry about spinning up a dedicated server to play with your friends. You just load in, invite them to party, and queue up. These conveniences are why this model is popular, not because of this bizarre conspiracy you're pushing.
Okay, have fun in your alternate reality where users host all of your data and you regularly lose characters or accounts you've spent months on because they decide they can't be arsed to host the server that you were on anymore. After all, you can't allow users to brings their characters/accounts cross-server because that's a cheating risk. :)
I think stuu99 is off-base in several of their points, but there's no denying that certain games have been online'd purely as a means of copy protection. Diablo 3 is a great example. It's a game that's perfectly enjoyable in single player, but they specifically moved parts off onto a remote server to prevent you from giving copies to your friends. They could have just as easily (in fact, probably more so) put everything the single player mode needs in the executable and required a login for multiplayer, as was done for Diablo 2, but they didn't. Even if you have no intention of playing online, you don't have option not to connect to Blizzard.
Can't you use the auction house from single-player? If so, this is part of my point. This isn't some grand conspiracy to limit ownership of games. This is the kind of thing that more people want. They want the interconnectedness and that is an understated part of why gaming has been taking off as of the last decade.
There are a lot of things that are designed to limit how you can use your software, but gaming is one of the places that companies genuinely don't have to do that because the features that necessitate limiting how you use said software (eg. introducing anti-cheats and forcing you to be online) is stuff that people actually want.
I'm not saying players in general don't want those features. I'm saying companies are taking advantage of that fact in order to require connectivity.
I never played Diablo 3 (because it's online-only) so I honestly don't know if the auction house is available on single player or not, but I'm going to assume that it is. OK. What if I have no interest in the auction house? What if I'm somewhat interested in it, but would much rather not be forced to connect to any service in order to play and consider not using the auction house a fair trade? It would be trivial to design the game so that it only connects when you try to use the auction house and to remain offline otherwise. In fact such an implementation is much simpler than to arbitrarily move critical components of the game onto a remote server. The only reason to do that for an optionally single player game is copy protection.
So yes, people nowadays expect online features, but this is a fact that's convenient for companies. And no, it's not a conspiracy. A conspiracy is an agreement between parties to perform an illicit act. What we have here is various separate parties independently converging on the idea that eroding private property rights (namely, your ability to play the games you bought unimpeded by any external factors) ensures future profits. If you haven't seen it, I recommend Ross Scott's series on dead games, to see how destructive this practice is.
I mean, I know it's convenient for companies, but there are other ways to look at this, namely that it obsoletes actual DRM and provides you with something in return, which DRM doesn't. Or, to say it another way, there are worse fates.
That being said, even now, there are few genuinely single-player games that require an online connection to play. It's not a fast-growing trend by any means and, thus, not a threat. People love to bandy Diablo 3 about, but the thing is that it's the only game that they can reasonably bandy about and that was released 10 years ago in May. Or, to say it another way, if you're going to complain about something, maybe you'd better keep your references up to date.
Most games these days are on Steam. You can trivially make any game that uses only Steam's DRM playable without Steam and even trivially remove SteamStub. That emulator that I mentioned even lets you play "online" with friends via P2P, sans Steam or any third-party server. Is it entirely legal? No, but neither is making old games that forced you to keep the CD in the drive that new computers no longer have playable without the CD. Or, to say it another way, if you're so committed to that ideal, why aren't you doing what you can to make it possible to stay committed to that ideal?
>People love to bandy Diablo 3 about, but the thing is that it's the only game that they can reasonably bandy about and that was released 10 years ago in May.
Hardly. Diablo 3 is probably the most famous example (partly because it's so popular, partly because it's direct predecessor didn't have an always-online requirement), but hardly the only one. Google "online only single player game" and you're bound to find a list.
>making old games that forced you to keep the CD in the drive that new computers no longer have playable without the CD.
If I have a disc or any other physical item I can at least take measures to protect it. I could conceivably put the console with the disc inside it in a closet, come back in thirty years, and play the game. I could back it up and wait for someone to make an emulator for the console. If the game needs a remote server to be up to run, there is nothing I can do to ensure I can continue playing the game in the future (other than painstakingly reverse-engineer the server). That's difference between owning something and not: control.
> Hardly. Diablo 3 is probably the most famous example (partly because it's so popular, partly because it's direct predecessor didn't have an always-online requirement), but hardly the only one. Google "online only single player game" and you're bound to find a list.
If this is that big of an issue, shouldn't you already know the examples and be able to list them off?
> If I have a disc or any other physical item I can at least take measures to protect it. I could conceivably put the console with the disc inside it in a closet, come back in thirty years, and play the game. I could back it up and wait for someone to make an emulator for the console. If the game needs a remote server to be up to run, there is nothing I can do to ensure I can continue playing the game in the future (other than painstakingly reverse-engineer the server). That's difference between owning something and not: control.
Ah, yes, so instead of waiting for someone to reverse engineer the server, you're waiting for someone to reverse engineer the console so that it remains playable in perpetuity. That's definitely different.
I can list the two I've played: Elite Dangerous and Planetary Annihilation. Another one I can name is The Crew. Yes, there's not that many, but I never said it was a huge problem, I just responded to your assertion that the only reason such games are online only is because of what players want. That's plainly false.
>Ah, yes, so instead of waiting for someone to reverse engineer the server, you're waiting for someone to reverse engineer the console so that it remains playable in perpetuity. That's definitely different.
You're responding to a specific example rather than the underlying point. That point being: when you own something you're free to do with it as you please. You don't need to ask for permission to read a book you own, although you do need to physically have the book on you to do so, and it needs to be intact enough that you can understand what's printed on it. A PlayStation game on a CD follows those same rules. Always online games don't.
> I can list the two I've played: Elite Dangerous and Planetary Annihilation. Another one I can name is The Crew.
I don't know enough about Planetary Annihilation, but Elite: Dangerous and The Crew were definitively designed to instance you to make it feel like things were going on around you. The only functional difference between them and MMOs is the amount of players you see at once. They were made to be played online, allowing you to seamlessly move from going it alone to playing with others. This goes back to my "people want the interconnectedness" point. Allowing you to instance yourself out doesn't change that.
> You're responding to a specific example rather than the underlying point.
No, you're missing my point entirely, which is that there's a maintenance cost to perpetuity. It's just placed somewhere else in this case.
Elite Dangerous has a multiplayer mode, but also a single player mode. Single player is single player, there's no reason to be connected, other than to make sure the player has not done something naughty with their copy.
>No, you're missing my point entirely, which is that there's a maintenance cost to perpetuity. It's just placed somewhere else in this case.
And what you're missing is that "perpetuity" is a lie. In practice most online games don't even to ten years before the developers shut their servers down permanently. If you really love Elite and you think it's the best game ever, you can take measures to continue playing it today, 38 years after it came out. Do you think Elite Dangerous will continue being profitable for another 30 years?
>I think stuu99 is off-base in several of their point
Then you're going to have to answer: why did we lose dedicated servers in fps and LAN in modern games like starcraft 2, and many others.
Things that used to come inside the game, Descent 1-3, Warcraft 1-3, Diablo 1-2, quake 1-3 Doom 1-3.
All those games had multiplayer built into their exe's. So you have a lot of explainig to do why multiplayer networking has been ripped out of games like
Games from pre-steam era, multiplayer still work because they were embedded inside the exe. So you have a lot of explaining to do claiming "your mmo's" are special and I'm wrong, the easiest explanation is mmo's are just stolen PC games and they've been ripping out networking code once they realized you were computer illiterate/irrational to an insane degree in 97 with the advent of ultima online, lineage, everquest, guild war 1, asherons call and wow.
FoC is an unreal engine game, so why would we need to sign in to a remote computer to play multiplayer, when unreal 1, UT2003, UT2004, didn't require that? Or could it be those were all honestly coded local applications before the mmo-backend apocalypse infected all of gaming.
You're responding to an argument I did not make. I specifically agreed with you that certain games have been crippled as a means of copy protection. Please try to read more carefully.
>You suggested there is a place for client server games
Sorry, but I simply did not say that.
>So the only way to keep ownership over your PC is not to buy any client-server software (no mmo's, no steam, no overwatch, etc). Why? Because client-server apps are the ultimate security risk
If you believe that, why are you using a web browser and posting on Hacker News? At the networking level there's no fundamental difference between using an online forum and playing an MMO. Did you audit your web browser and HN's code?
Because despite popular belief, market economies aren't as efficient as we think and they add bureaucracy even when it's not logical to do so.
Useless jobs covers this quite well. But the tldr is that assuming the market runs in logical is a flawed assumption and that the market adds inefficiencies on its own.
When I was a kid I pirated music like it was no ones business. I didn't really stop until Spotify came to the US and signed up. For the price of $10/month, I could listen to all the music I ever wanted. Even though at that point I had a good system for pirating music, I pretty much gave up pirating music because Spotify was just so damn good.
Spotify in my eyes, rather than trying to stop music piracy, just started to compete with it.