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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

If piracy was really that big a problem then the entire PC gaming industry wouldn't exist. The issue really was that microtransactions were too easy on mobile, and freemium/casino-like games were simply making too much money, so no developer had the incentive to make anything else.

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Steam, Steam sales, and constantly updated games were the fixes to piracy.

If a game gets content updates every other month, re-downloading a pirated game, and possibly losing all progress, meh.

If a game is going to go on sale for $20 (or $10) after awhile, why bother pirating it, just wait.

And Steam is absurdly convenient. Built in voice chat, collectables, and forums, means playing games on Steam is better than playing pirated games.

> Steam, Steam sales, and constantly updated games were the fixes to piracy.

Steam is a DRM platform.

There are plenty of games on Steam with no DRM at all, including Valve's own Half-Life and Portal games.

While Steam itself certainly has DRM infrastructure, it's not required and easily bypassed. Valve allows other 3rd-party DRM solutions, but I'd argue that the built-in DRM is one of the less important aspects of steam.

For me, Steam Workshop is the killer feature for a bunch of games. It's hard to beat zero-effort auto-synced modding and zero-effort mod accessibility for tech-illiterate friends.

> If piracy was really that big a problem then the entire PC gaming industry wouldn't exist.

Ever hear of DRM? How about consoles that brick themselves if they detect that they've been modified?

Isn’t iOS already one big DRM? Probably much more effective versus piracy than something like Denuvo as well. And anyways we’ve already come to expect DRM to for any reasonably popular game to be cracked in short order.

In which case, we’d still expect PCs to be in an equivalent, if not worse state.

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