Look, I like free stuff as much as the next guy, but I don't buy (no pun intended) the results of this study: https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/06/15/us-recorded-musi...
Look at years; that's when portable music players; then smartphones; started to become popular
Pirating is easier than buying CD then ripping MP3 just to listen.
If we had the ease of use of today's music streaming the dip would probably be much lower; but between the tech at the time and RIAA cockblocking anyone that tried.
Continuing the game piracy line, game piracy is often a significantly worse service outside of the “free stuff” aspect. You have to learn how torrents work, download risky executable files from the internet, and/or run sketchy cracking utilities. VS Steam or GoG which are generally fairly polished experiences that offer nice value-adds (updating, social features, etc).
Take Cyberpunk 2077 or The Witcher 3. You can buy a DRM free copy from GoG pretty easily… yet the torrents for it are still quite active from what I can see.
Sure, not everyone has $70 to drop on a AAA, but then you get into the copyleft argument that authors would still benefit by giving their content to people who cant afford the list price for a reduced price or even free since you wouldn’t have sold it at full price anyway so you’re missing out on the word of mouth marketing and any lower revenue paid.
He absolutely can. Steam is DRM but it's the least shitty DRM implementation I've ever seen. I get very angry when corporations start rolling their own shitty stores instead of just using Steam for everything. I have games on my account that used to be sold on Steam but aren't available anymore because the corporation made their own store. It's hard to describe how aggravating that is.
Back in the day I'd buy games I already had on Steam just for the convenience of having them on Steam. There's a reason people don't remember what PC gaming used to be like before Steam and it's because Steam made them forget all about stuff like downloading multiple 500 MB incremental patches just to play online. Steam is essentially the Windows package manager.
Steam DRM is entirely optional and not required to put the game on Steam. DRM is game developer choice, steam is just giving a (shitty, easily breakable) option.
> Take Cyberpunk 2077 or The Witcher 3. You can buy a DRM free copy from GoG pretty easily… yet the torrents for it are still quite active from what I can see.
Well, some people won't start paying even if they have means. And some will not have enough money to ever say "okay I will actually buy game instead of putting it towards updating my rig". Question is really how many of those would be converted vs. just not play the game, especially now where there is plenty of F2P stuff, or insane value bundles or sales.
Really? I've never thought so. Perhaps if you consider buying the CD as a major burden, which I don't get.
Put CD in computer. Rip at your choice of bitrate. Listen.
vs.
Download pirating software. Search for song. Download song. Verify it's not a trojan for an executable or zip bomb, etc. Verify you got the full songs. Verify you got the actual songs you were looking for. Verify that it's not a low quality rip. Listen.
Anyway, that's my opinion on this matter.
It is incredibly faster than going to the store.