Yup, if you present me a side-by-side of the free one and the paid one when the free one is better even disregarding costs, I’m pirating 100% of the time.
- “Oh, you’ll only have access to this as long as our servers remain online or as long as we keep renewing the license.”
- “Sorry, your device needs to phone home to use this.”
- “Don’t you love ads in your paid product?”
- “You’ll need to juggle several different services if you want what you can otherwise get for free on a central hub.”
- “Yes, you can only use this on one or two devices at a time thanks to DRM.”
- “Fuck you, you’ll need an account with us to use this even though you bought it without that account somewhere else.”
- “This thing’s only ongoing cost on our end is version updates you totally need and want, so it’ll be an indefinite subscription (which we’ll make a pain in the ass to cancel).”
- “This game runs noticeably worse because of the shitty DRM we shoehorned in.”
- “You’re saying you don’t like being spied on for ad targeting?”
- “You can only get this bundled with a bunch of other bullshit you don’t want and would never pay for individually.”
- “Our UI that you’re forced to interact with to use this is fucking garbage.”
- “We don’t sell this anymore; ask Scalper4478 on eBay.”
- “We use the money that you pay us to lobby against your rights as a consumer.”
- “We somehow lack QoL features that the free version has.”
You’ll need to juggle several different services if you want what you can otherwise get for free on a central hub.
This one, while common, I kind of take issue with. You’re basically complaining that there is no one, all-consuming media oligarchy that owns EVERY show/movie, and distributes it on their singular massively overpriced service (and yes, with that market stranglehold, they would massively overprice it)
Shouldn’t the principle of competition mean there are multiple services, each trying to present better content? People reasonably contend with only being subscribed to a few they care about - I don’t know who is assuming they should get access to all media, all the time, without paying truckloads of money.
I will grant that for games, no service beats Steam, but I will absolutely buy games from other platforms like Itch and GOG in the spirit of competition when their prices or better or the dev has avoided Steam for reasons of adult content censorship.
Interesting that you pick GOG and Itch as examples, because I have all my gemes from these platforms available Through Lutris in a central interface. And it works well because Lutris can, provided my login info, just download and install the games without needing any extra services.
Nah. We need legal protection to separate content creators and distributiors. Creator’s license content. Laws could mandate all distributors get access to the same pricing. Then you pick the distribution platform you enjoy.
Creator’s compete for views with quality content.
Distributors compete for users with features and curation.
No exclusive rights. No studio running a streaming platform. No streaming platform starting up studios. None of this anticompetitive lock-in.
I don’t even know if I disagree with that approach, but how would you mandate equal pricing? The relationship between producer and content distributor today is normally based on length of time and the general size of the audience, like “$2 million to distribute in these five countries for the next year”
For that matter, given how much media is produced internationally, how would you set up every country to agree on terms simultaneously?
I’m in favor of a system that empowers creators, but I’m also aware they tend to only get funding from big publishers with big expectations on return (including licensing rights). A system without lock-in contracts may just mean no one helps them create their vision.
I made that point short to be pithy, but what I actually take issue with in there being so many streaming services is that:
- Upfront transparency for what shows and movies are actually there, let alone in what state, is often incredibly limited. This isn’t inherent to there being multiple services, but when I haven’t found one whose experience isn’t profoundly shitty, I’m counting it against them.
- Even if you accurately assess which subscriptions you need at first, that can collapse at any time because shows are treated as playing cards, and you often need to put ongoing effort beyond just paying money into maintaining that list. (I often watch shows over months or years instead of binging them, and this is super shitty under a streaming service.)
- Even if you have all those subscriptions and maintain them well, there’s no place to centrally view their content, something which cable TV – for what a piece of shit it was – shockingly made easier than streaming. If I purchase half my games from Steam and half from GOG, I can still access what I buy from a shared location: my desktop. If I purchase a bunch of discs from multiple different vendors, it’s all centralized on my DVD rack. The UI is consistent (and even slightly quicker to access). This isn’t massive, but it’s still objectively a point against them.
- Unlike the PC gaming landscape where games are often available across multiple stores, streaming services are becoming increasingly exclusivity-focused, and this happens because there’s such an oligopoly in the TV and film industry, and basically every member of that oligopoly now runs a streaming service.
I don’t think the point should be that there should be one streaming service to rule them all, but that in their current state, they represent an objectively substantial downgrade to piracy even taking away costs.
