Hopefully this will once again force content producers to consider the risks of prioritizing profits exclusively, at the cost of convenience and fragmentation. Worked 10 years ago, should work equally fine today.
Now pirates complain about "convenience and fragmentation." Saying they want a service with everything all in one place.
The truth is that pirates want content for free. Which is fine. I get that. But don't try to package up this belief as some kind of principled "civil disobedience."
You want to watch other people's stuff for free. Own it.
If such a thing existed for TV and movies it would be a no-brainer too. And Netflix was that for a while. Sure, it didn’t have everything but it had enough that I had more good content than I could watch. It’s not that it’s fragmented, it’s that too expensive to maintain 7 streaming service subscriptions. So most people seem to pick one or two, account share to get coverage, and then pirate what still isn’t available.
Ditto for computer games, as everything I care about is always available on one of the three (!) services I use: Battle.net, Steam and GOG. That's an example of low fragmentation. I gladly spend hundreds a year on this. I never have to worry that my favorite game will disappear from my catalog. Never have to worry about DRM servers shutting down and making my purchases worthless.
The same is not the case for movies and series, as the movie industry in particular is still digging its heels and refusing to build something that properly serves its prospective customers. Multiple examples of DRM servers shutting down. Weekly examples of content disappearing from a particular platform, or changing its licensing terms to make it unavailable in my location. You'd have to be a chump to accept these terms.
The alternative should be obvious.
There's an argument that music has gone downhill also because of it. You either do well as a band with the first two albums and translate that into tour money or you are gone. I can't imagine that a lot of artists that don't make tour money like Enya would ever emerge these days - no matter how good their studio stuff is.
Quality series creation driven by money flowing from streaming services is one of the few bright sparks in quality entertainment these days other than gaming. If everyone decides to pirate the crap out of that we end up essentially with middle of the road rubbish as we basically are at the cinema now.
I get the frustration about needing to have so many services, it feels like we have just uninvented cable to reinvent it again (I'm waiting for places to start selling packages of streaming) but the benefit at least has been in programming.
After all, media conglomerates have had 10 years to prepare and perfect their anti-piracy systems. What happens in an arms race if one of the sides stops innovating for a decade?
and yet it's trivial today to obtain any media you want to watch for free. popcorn time comes to mind, but there's countless others.
Fighting piracy is like trying to fight the tide.
and it's not because of piracy. It's because these games _do_ absolutely bring in more money, due to the way it's designed to fuel addiction.
There's plenty of games in the indie games market that are original and fresh. But the unfortunate outcome of those games is that they don't bring in as much money, and so any failure dooms the indie developer.