The pirates are back - Anew study from the European Union’s Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) suggest that online piracy has increased for the first time in years. In fact, piracy rates have bee…::We analyze a new study where the EUIPO suggests online piracy is on the increase within the European Union.
I believe it was Gabe Newell who said the best way to avoid piracy is by making legitimate purchasing easier and/or better.
In the early history of streaming services, you could get access to a lot of content in a straightforward way for not much money. People started doing that instead of pirating. The corporations got greedy, they made the services worse and increased the price to the point that piracy is preferable again.
And I don’t have the least amount of sympathy. Yarr matey.
It’s funny because I pirate everything… except PC games. Because it’s so cheap and convenient on steam to just buy them, I like the tracked achievements thing and comparing to friends, and I can play the games on any PC or my steam deck with a quick login and install. I can easily download and install PC games from my private trackers but steam is just so easy and cheap. If movies and TV were as convenient and affordable as steam I wouldn’t pirate any of it. But as it stands, I’d have to pay over $200 a month just to have access to all the streaming services that have shows that I like. Fuck that noise. Someone needs to make a version of Steam for media. Kind of like Vudu but less crappy. Just let me pay a few bucks to own a series or a movie, have lots of good sales and deals, let me access the content on all platforms easily, and I would definitely start building a library over time like I’ve done with steam.
edit: I still do pirate games on PC sometimes just to try them, but usually end up buying on steam because it works better and it can be played on multiple devices easily.
Almost all games these days have a requirement to be online to play them, even in single player, and are absolutely ridden with DRM, sometimes even to the extent that it installs rootkits like in the case of Uplay and Valorant. By not voting with your wallet and pirating it yourself, you’re doing yourself and the community at large a disservice. ^♪
edit because they deleted:
“Poopkins” wrote
Almost all games these days have a requirement to be online to play them, even in single player, and are absolutely ridden with DRM, sometimes even to the extent that it installs rootkits like in the case of Uplay and Valorant. By not voting with your wallet and pirating it yourself, you’re doing yourself and the community at large a disservice. ^
And I replied
Okay then. I guess you didn’t even fucking read what I wrote.
With the advent of self hosted streaming services and the arr services the option is even easier now. If 1 in 20 ppl are motivated/tech savvy that’s 20 streaming products not being paid for.
What would be the technology behind my own streaming platform?
So far I do it very old school with data on my Nas and a software that catalogs and plays over Lan only.
Look into the arr suite of apps, radarr + sonarr + prowlarr to manage your library and jellyfin/PleX to play it. Get overseer for request management. You can set it up for remote access from anywhere, have people make requests on overseer and have the data available a few mins later. It’s amazing when it’s set up.
Plex is the most worked on solution out there, runs on Windows, Linux and Linux headless. For the automation of stuff then looking at suff like radarr and sonar alovk with tracktarr and jackett foe the trackers, along with a torrent client. There is also jellyfin as a media client, it’s more open, but getting users onto it could be more problematic as it isn’t as straight fwd from what I hear, haven’t used it myself though.
