- cross-posted to:
- moviesandtv@lemmy.film
- cross-posted to:
- moviesandtv@lemmy.film
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And I axed Netflix. So we’re even.
Why would you be even? They got rid of it because for whatever reason people complained about offering a more economical option. Use whatever streaming services you want though. At this point it’s just about content. I don’t get the random Netflix hate from Reddit in particular.
Or we could sail the high seas again.
Generally it’s agreed the best way to stop piracy is by offering a more convenient alternative. I generally for example don’t pirate video games available on Steam. With streaming services being so disjoint and expensive now I’ve gone back to pirating, at least with cable you can bundle channels.
Also stopped pirating games when steam came around. And I stopped pirating shows and movies with the rise of streaming services. Now though, I’m looking into standing up a media server.
i have crappy internet and there’s no way to preload a movie with netflix so the service is useless to me. i have to torrent
That’s unfortunate but understandable.
I buy steam games, even ones I’ve already pirated, for a few reasons.
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Quick and easy downloads
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Seamless updates
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Almost all my other purchased games in one place.
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Cloud saves
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Durability, just knowing my games will be available to download on my next PC for the foreseeable future.
And I pirate just about everything I watch mainly because I’m not willing to play musical subscriptions to watch the shows I want to see at the end of a long day.
If the film industry had a service that offered a similar experience to a Plex share, I’d pay quite a bit for it. But instead they have this system designed to extract maximum value from every viewer, and I’m tired of it.
Gabe Newell was right on the money when he said piracy is a service issue, not a price issue.
To add onto this, when someone who can’t afford something pirates something, there is no lost sale because there never was a sale there to begin with. It didn’t take any money away from the company since they were never going to see any money from that person.
With that said, the only piracy I partake in is for archival purposes, and like you I buy Steam games regardless because it’s too convenient like you said.
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at least with cable you can bundle channels
For about the same price as it currently costs to bundle all the major streaming platforms. Plus, cable never had anything near the amount of content we have now on streaming.
I think people who compare cable to streaming don’t remember what it was like before streaming
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Why can we buy games cheaper on other services then?
Steam works and the prices are good and I don’t see them buying exclusives. That’s good enough for me nothing is perfect.
The way Epic handled competition was by strong-handing exclusives constantly without actually providing a better service. Last time I bought a game from Epic, it didn’t even have a cart system to buy games in bulk. Couple that with the tolerance of cryptocurrency/blockchain and acquisitions of sites like Artstation and Bandcamp, and yeah - people have reasons to not like Epic. I’ve heard stories of people getting locked out of their banks because of the lack of a cart and they were buying a lot of games in a short amount of time. I’ve also heard stories about people’s Epic accounts getting breached because of Fortnite BS.
And I’m saying this as someone who uses multiple launchers. I hated Steam back in the mid-2010s (skipped the middleman and bought GTAV from Rockstar directly) and they were in quite a bad rut with Steam Greenlight and the paid mods fiasco. People were rightfully loudly critical of Steam and at a time, Valve really did not deserve taking a 30% cut. They’ve done a lot since then to recoup that lost trust and deserve the 30% cut, Proton and the Steam Deck being a massive part of that for many people.
Steam is definitely not as bad as you’re making it out to be.
I’ve had a very pleasant experience every time I’ve talked to Steam Support. What’s so bad about them?
Gabe Newall said himself that piracy is never a price problem, but a service problem.
Go Gaben!
That’s such a simple yet legendary quote… moreso with each passing decade
Yep, and when netflix took off piracy took a dive because of how good it was. Then every studio decided they wanted their piece of the streaming pie so pulled all their content off netflix and released their own streaming service, so now we’re basically back to having to pay $100 a month to get access to everything, just like we were with cable before netflix changed the game. Shockingly, piracy has shot up again.
These companies are so stupid and greedy.
The only games I’ll pirate are ones that are no longer available to buy, because what else am I supposed to do?
I think a much better comparison than Steam would be Spotify.
I use Plex for all my movies and TV shows for the same reasons you mentioned. All my stuff can be in one place instead of having to pay for Netflix, Hulu, Peacock, Disney+, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, and whatever other fucking shit is out there.
Plex also supports music libraries, but I don’t use that feature. Why? Because Spotify has literally 99.9% of all the music I want to listen to, and aside from maybe like Garth Brooks, the other 0.1% is on Youtube. Spotify did it right by just having a basic service that you can pay for and get everything you want. If I had to subscribe to Spotify, Tidal, Napster (Still a thing I guess?), and 4 other services just to access all the music I listen to, I’d go back to piracy.
With Spotify slowly starting to reach a limit in subscribers, it’s unfortunately only a matter of time until they start pulling what Netflix is doing and finding new ways to get money from customers.
Spotify is already making people pay for sound quality that’s akin to a TDK C90
best way to stop piracy is by offering a more convenient alternative. I generally for example don’t pirate video games available on Steam
I have towed this line for years. Recently Battlefield 2042 was available on steam for a great price so I snapped it up. I’d played it at release via a 1 month trial of EA play and it was absolute trash.
The game is totally fixed! The problem I have, is that I bought it on steam…and it forces me to install and keep myself logged in to the EA app anyway. It fails to launch the game every single time. I have to reboot my computer, manually log out of EA and log back in. It is an absolute shitfight, because EA gargle balls all day.
My point is, I bought the game on steam and I got absolutely duped. I’m all for a bigger library, but not if it means I have to install and use the other crappy apps anyway. Such a disappointment, I won’t be so quick to buy on steam anymore unless they implement a great big flashing red warning that the game is not actually on steam at all.
I swore off buying games from companies like EA, and Ubisoft years ago. I’m still bitter about getting duped with Far Cry 3.
They do put the warning when a game needs a 3rd party launcher tho?
Not big enough, red enough, or flashing enough. I like steam a lot. I don’t like EA one little bit, or battlenet, or any of those other half-built apps.
I cancelled Netflix last month and had only kept it that long for family members.
After cancelling, I got a welcome back email because they’re apparently happy to let anyone logged in reactivate the subscription…
So I contacted them again to cancel, get a refund and ask what happened.
Then I decided I wanted to remove my card details from the account, but apparently you can only do that by contacting support…
So they think it’s okay to let anyone restart the subscription from a TV without entering a password, but they’ll make you contact support to remove card details…
Change the password before you deactivate again?
Chargeback
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I’d give the solution, but I’d be put on multiple lists.
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Only if you plan to never do business with them ever again. I did that for a ps4 game on the PlayStation store that didn’t work with no refunds, and Sony locked down my account until I paid them that money. Pretty sure they warned that next time they won’t be so nice. Pretty fucked up.
Just about everywhere does that. People love throwing around the charge back option on the internet but it often fucked you over. Some companies use 3rd party payment processors so it can not only ban you from the company you charged back but also anything else using that processor.
It’s not fucked up at all. Doing a charge back for what you did is basically stealing. You kept the game and got your money back.
I only kept the game, because they have no mechanism for returning it. I didn’t want the game.
You’re also ignoring the power dynamic here. The consumer has zero power in situations like this. A charge back is one of the few tools we have to try to avoid being taken advantage by corporations.
What, am I going to sue Sony Computer Entertainment, and best them in court? Or is it more likely that they’re aware that they hold all of the power in this dynamic?
Any “power dynamic” is not the point. You bought something and then tried to circumvent it to get your money back while keeping the content.
Does Sony’s refund policy suck? Yep, it does.
Is what you did essentially stealing? Also yes.
Doing chargebacks is a common scam btw. People will buy something, get the item or service, then do a charge back to get their money back, with the bank/provider doing it and then putting the burden on the retailer to prove that the person got what they paid for, which is often impossible.
Think about it like buying something on eBay, getting it, then asking ebay for your money back saying that you never received the item.
If it didn’t work and there were no refunds, then what the hell else do you do? There was stealing, but it wasn’t this guy.
Sure, but there are no PS4 digital games that “don’t work”.
I honestly can’t remember the exact situation, but I believe it was related to mistakenly buying something that was an add-on or dlc for a game I didn’t own, thinking it was a bundle with the game AND the add-on. It may even have been my fault, though it was certainly misleading.
But it was about $13 on an account that has spent literally thousands. They blocked my account and I couldn’t connect to their network with my ps4/ps5 until I bought ~$13 in PlayStation store credit and added it to my account.
Great way to treat a loyal customer. It’s almost like they know very well that they have all the power in this dynamic, and that I wasn’t going to give up thousands of dollars in games over 13 bucks.
When they get a customer locked in like that, they know they can get away with anything, and they do.
You can call it what you want, but it’s not unethical. I’m not even sure what they did would even be legal in Europe
We axed Netflix two years ago.
