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’d gladly support the content creators, be it with merch, Kickstarter, patreon or any other direct way. Giving the money to the corporate balls of greed is another story
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I wish I could up AND downvote this, as it gets the point across well, but MAN do I hate that point. Also, the fact that EVERYTHING has its own streaming service now… No, I’m not paying you a subscription to watch 1 show. If you dont want to give the main streaming players a cut, just sell each season as a oje time purchase
If not, we can expect to see legal channels raising their prices again to cover the losses caused by piracy.
what a shitty take. Well, anyone who has better memory than only one month back can realize that the reason the people turned to piracy was that they raised their prices. There is no loss caused by piracy. They only missed potential gains. And the reason they raised their prices were not because they were loosing money. Was because they needed to “grow infinitely”. If the free market evangelists are right, the free market will self regulate and the prices will go down in order to attract back the lost customers lol
I’m not disagreeing with you—the conclusion these services have taken are indeed not logical ones based on historical trends—but I’m curious how you know these services didn’t need to raise the fees? Why have you assumed that it’s to “grow infinitely”?
From my understanding, almost all streaming video providers except Netflix have been operating on a loss. That can only be sustained for so long before the parent company will need to see it begin to generate a positive revenue stream. The most straightforward way to do that is to increase subscription fees. Furthermore, the number of subscribers of Paramount+, MGM+ or even Disney+ is certainly not trending towards “infinite growth.”
I’m not justifying anything, because with five monthly services that have been hiking prices I’m looking at what to slash myself, but I was eager to encourage a bit more discourse on this topic.
Why is this being downvoted? I thought Lemmy was a place for discourse? How does this not contribute to an open discussion?
Pretty common take that people feel like they’ve seen and argued in a lot of other places. In the future, ask YOURSELF why you got downvoted, not the thread. Works way better.
That can only be sustained for so long before the parent company will need to see it begin to generate a positive revenue stream. The most straightforward way to do that is to increase subscription fees. Furthermore, the number of subscribers of Paramount+, MGM+ or even Disney+ is certainly not trending towards “infinite growth.”
then their model is flawed. They sell something at loss in order to attract customers because they know that if they sell it at higher profit margins customers will not come. Customers are willing to buy it as long as it is in a price that they are willing to compromise at. So, when they raise their prices, customers realize that now it is above the price they are willing to pay and step out. Their model is based on hoping that the customers will forget or be bored to cancel a subscription that they cannot afford anymore. However it is a subscription that they wouldn’t had been willing to buy in this price in the first place.
So, their initial market share and adoption rate was what it was because of the price of the subscription and the rate of price/value-of-product. Customers are not willing to pay double price and they wouldn’t had paid it in the first place. They are not loosing customers. They are not loosing potential profit. They are basing their numbers in a faked artificial audience that opted in only because it was a good deal in the initial price.
And while the free market evangelists would argue that the market would self regulate, you know what will they in reality do? Ask the government for stricter enforcement of anti-piracy laws because huge loss . Loss based on nothing but their imagination of imaginative potential profit based on “if everyone was continuing buying our product with the same adoption rate we would had X billions. So since we don’t have X billions, this is a loss”. Great math skills and applying of logic.
There are certainly consumers out there with this kind of mentality, but it’s a common sales strategy to lure new customers with a reduced subscription fee for the first months only. It evidently works, because businesses have been doing this long before SVOD services, or even the internet for that matter, existed.
I expect that indeed, a significant number of customers cannot be bothered to cancel a subscription once they begin to use it, or, put another way, perceive the value of it to be justified against the increased price. I don’t think it’s fair to call this a fake audience, because these are real users of which a certain percentage will be retained.
Another factor that probably weighs into this is the competitive race to the bottom among the many SVOD offerings that are available today. Users like you and me perceive a certain dollar amount as the maximum that we are willing to pay, but where does that figure come from? If you are a new player in this space, you are effectively capped to the current market price for subscription fees, whether or not that covers your costs.
The free market effect will gradually resolve this as services that are all currently operating at a loss will correct their price models, which is what I believe is currently happening.
You’re missing the point, the article is wrong: it’s not about the prices.
The comments: “Wow this article is trash dont they know [reason] is why I’m back to piracy?”
Me: You do realize what EUIPO does, right? That maybe their paper has a very obvious bias?
For those like me who have no idea what EUIPO is:
EUIPO stands for the EU Intellectual Property Office.
Since 2012, the EUIPO has hosted the European Observatory on Infringements of Intellectual Property Rights, which brings public and private stakeholders together in the fight against piracy and counterfeiting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Intellectual_Property_Office
I’ve started to pirate games again, which I never saw a reason to in 15 years. Simply because 2 hours refund window isn’t enough for the crap they sell now. Performance from hell and half assed story after you left the tutorial.
Gamepass kind of stopped me a bit on that, but it’s a subscription and only a matter of time till there’s competition with exclusives and increased price.
Games also got too expensive, there’s more competition than ever and I earn less money than my parents used to, I simply can’t pay that much, yet the games start to cost 90€ upwards. So even if I buy a key, it’s still 65€ or more, for an often broken game. No thank you.
Just wait, dude. Prices on games come down so fast, there’s really not much reason to pirate.
Not an option. I dislike spoiler and I need a new PC to play coop games with friends anyways. What’s the point of a new expensive PC if I play only old games? I also don’t feel like participating in gaming communities much, if everything has been discovered 1 or 2 years before me. No one gives a fuck if I find out some cool hidden features, if it has been discussed already and everyone can watch 1000 better YouTube guides. Playing on release is great entertainment for me and always will be.
I’m gonna be honest, for me, everything you said there is precisely why I like being a patient gamer. Can play all the games I want without spending as much on hardware or on the games themselves. Am playing the most completed and patched version of the game. Have heaps of resources available online to help me optimise my gameplay.
I totally get wanting to play the game when it’s fresh. You miss out on being part of the buzz of a new game if you wait to play it. Every gaming site is full of memes about a new game for the first few months after release and it’s definitely part of the experience to be on the “in” side of that.
With that said, I just pick and choose which games matter to me for that nowadays, and I commit myself to actually beating the games I buy (assuming I don’t hate them). Committing to beating them before buying a new game has really cut back on my buying of new games only to have it languish in my backlog and see price drops before I ever play it.
This way I do get to be part of that community for the games that really matter to me, but I also am not just buying everything out there at full price.
I feel like they used to do this, now it’s a crapshoot. My Steam wishlist has become rife with games I’m kind of interested in, but never go on enough of a sale for me to seriously consider. Which is honestly probably not a problem given I already have more games than I’m likely to finish in my lifetime at the rate I play them now.
Not to mention cracked games let you avoid the company’s terrible launcher (looking at you uplay). Steaming pile of unnecessary garbage. I have cracked copies of a lot of the games I own for reasons like that, Pirated games just have a better offline experience in my opinion. Online games are another story.
Tried crusader kings 3 on game pass, I liked the game but every tube after 30min or an hour, the windows drm would have a hiccup and close the game, ended up getting a cracked version, while still paying for the subscription, never had a crash again… fuck this shitty drm.
Crusader kings 3 (just like all other Paradox Games) doesn’t even have DRM. You can start the whole game without steam or the shitty PDX launcher, so no idea what you are on about. A “cracked” version is the exact same piece of software.
