I don't pirate games anymore but I still routinely pirate TV content because dealing with this nonsense is just not worth the time and effort. I'm willing to buy media. I'm not willing to be told when and where I can watch it. I buy my movies and TV on physical media, then pirate a copy to actually watch on my various devices. Far more convenient for me than bending over backwards for DRM schemes.
My Steam games, meanwhile, largely all work on Windows and Linux with no silly barriers stopping me. Just one reasonable one: login to Steam once in a while.
It's made game piracy the hassle by comparison, which is the opposite direction than that taken by current media streaming. Gabe was right when he said piracy is caused by service issues.
Yeah, DRM-free stores like GOG demonstrate that you don't need DRM to sell digital media. But movie industry is still stuck in this stupid dinosaur mentality.
> Yeah, DRM-free stores like GOG demonstrate that you don't need DRM to sell digital media. But movie industry is still stuck in this stupid dinosaur mentality.
GOG loses money, has lost money every day of it's operation, and would have gone bust long ago if it wasn't subsidised by CD Projekt.
How does it demonstrate that exactly? GOG is essentially a charity at this point, and CD Projekt has already said they are cutting costs and reducing the amount of new titles it will put on the service because that is unsustainable.
That's not due to DRM. It's due to [some] publishers not releasing more games there like on Steam. These publishers are leaving that money on the table. As soon as they put their games there, they start getting sales. So this ballistically only highlights the above point that DRM isn't needed.
GOG gets a lot of credit and it's deserved, but it's worth mentioning that the vast majority of Steam games are mostly DRM free and when they do include DRM it's at the behest of the studios. You would probably be surprised at the amount of games where you can simply right click them in your library and go to "Local files" and just see raw media laying around - JPGs, PNGS, etc.
What you are referring to is asset encryption, not DRM. Many games have DRM (e.g. Steam API and Denuvo linked into the executable) but do not encrypt their assets; it's mostly "live service" games and competitive games with matchmaking and anti-cheat that do, usually with the intent of preventing future update leaks. On the other hand it's also common for DRM-free games to use custom (usually unencrypted but possibly compressed) asset and archive formats you can't easily open, especially if they are made using an off-the-shelf engine such as Unity or Unreal.
For what it's worth, there are open source projects that will pretend to be Steam that will run many downloaded Steam games quite effectively. All you need to do is drop a few DLLs and text files in the game's folder and you're good to go. For a safe version you need to figure out how to compile the source code yourself of course but on this forum I don't expect that to be much of a barrier.
Games with DRM crapware like Denuvo and many multiplayer games are more difficult to pirate, but the basic Steam DRM is pretty useless. That's good, in a way, because when Valve inevitably goes bust these games will still be playable.
However, if you can afford to spend 15 bucks on a game, I don't see why you'd go through the effort of downloading (and virus scanning!) games. For kids and poor people I can understand spending the extra time and effort, but for people with jobs that value their free time I don't see the advantage of just paying for the game.
I suppose the lack of demos is a reason, you don't want to spend 15 bucks on a game that turns out to be boring or broken. I pirated CP2077 to check if it could run on my PC but after a few hours I paid full launch price for it, they could've convinced me with just a demo despite the negative media attention. I still remember the Just Cause 2 demo where the demo alone was a great game you could play for many hours and the full game was even better.
Most(all?) steam games have a dependency on the local steam service running, as drm goes it is fairly lightweight and easily circumvented, however it is still Digital Rights Management in my book.
My Steam games, meanwhile, largely all work on Windows and Linux with no silly barriers stopping me. Just one reasonable one: login to Steam once in a while.
It's made game piracy the hassle by comparison, which is the opposite direction than that taken by current media streaming. Gabe was right when he said piracy is caused by service issues.