this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2024
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Yep. DRM has been and continues to be a complete waste of everyone's time that only makes things worse for paying customers. Pirates get the best experience and then companies wonder why they struggle to get people to pay for inferior experiences. Gabe Newell hit the nail on the head over a decade ago when he said:
Instead companies keep doing the exact opposite, and surprise piracy isn't impacted at all.
Gabe Newell really nailed it there. I buy tons of games on Steam. I also used to subscribe to Netflix and rent movies from Google. But now Netflix has junk and I need to subscribe to 10 services and they occasionally deleted my partner's downloaded shows while traveling because they couldn't validate the license. I can't even play HD videos from any legal retailer on any of my devices other than a Chromecast as they aren't under the media lobby's control.
But say I was to download a movie from a torrent site. It would probably be a higher quality than streaming services would give me, I can play it offline with no concerns about license expiry and it will still be 4k on every device I choose to watch on. I could also take a screenshot and share to my friend (which may cause them to purchase that content!). It's basically all upsides. Maybe slightly more difficult to find the content than something like Google Play rentals, but really not much and the tradeoff is the greater choice of content available.
It is reductive to say that piracy is just a service problem. There are lots of people who will try to save the money. But a lot of those people wouldn't spend much if any money either way. They would just skip most content, or watch with friends or similar. There is a huge group of people (myself included) that would happily pay a significant amount for content if they provided a good experience. But they are too busy failing to stop piracy to bother giving a good experience.
Yeah I mean you've basically got three district groups at play.
The first group, either have no money or no interest in your goods or services. They might turn to piracy if it's available, but even if it isn't they're still not buying anything from you. DRM is pointless to this group because it's not stopping anything.
The second group are the marginal cases. They potentially have the money to buy your products, but maybe they're pinching pennies or they aren't convinced your products are worth the price you're asking for them. A lot of pirates of Adobe PhotoShop a couple decades back would have fallen into this group. DRM might be effective on this group, but there's a strong argument to be made that it's going to cost you just as many sales as it earns you, and ultimately doesn't actually stop piracy, merely delays it a bit. You'd likely see as many or more sales from this group if you removed the DRM and added more features or cut your prices
The last group are your paying customers. They're already happily (or at least grudgingly) giving you money. The only thing DRM is doing for this group is making their experience worse and likely pushing them towards that second group.
There's basically no group where DRM is really improving things. At best you're breaking even, at worst it's costing you sales, to say nothing of the development costs of implementing the DRM in the first place.
Last year I could cast episodes of DS9 I get from Paramount+ through Amazon Prime to my parents’ TV. This year I can’t, likely as an anti-piracy measure. So I hooked my device up via HDMI. Still couldn’t watch it on the TV. You know what? I’m gonna go complain to them before I stop subscribing.