[meditate]

>Pirating games has never been as unattractive as it has been today due to Steam's monopoly and ubiquity.

This is a cop out to me. I have never been a fan of DRM for this reason, because it requires an unassailable monopoly for customers not to notice that it's a problem. I am probably in the minority because I've never been happy with Steam's service because of this, but as long as they are the 800 pound gorilla in the room then they obviously never will listen to any of my complaints.

If you take this line of thinking to movies, it leads to dangerous ideas like "everyone but my favorite streaming service should just close down" which is totally ridiculous, but still when I talk to friends about this issue they are quick to propose that as the solution! It really makes me try to avoid contact with the digital publishing industry as much as possible. What we see now is the movie studios' response to that which is:

- To increase the size of the data dramatically (4K+ video) so that casual sharing requires hardware investment and thus remains difficult

- To make things highly dependent on a very specialized backend to work correctly (Netflix's recent experiment with branching narratives)

- To start bundling it with other things (Amazon Prime)

- To offer streaming analytics as a better data platform than the traditional Nielsen ratings

- And probably more I can't think of right now

The thing is that these are all real value adds which I am glad to see them competing on. Right now all the downstream vendors are forced to invest in rolling their own DRM. I would rather see copyright holders offering a system where a proof of purchase can be transferred between services, but they would need to band together to actually do it and start putting that into their contracts. Can you imagine if we had that instead of DRM?

[TeMPOraL]

> If you take this line of thinking to movies, it leads to dangerous ideas like "everyone but my favorite streaming service should just close down" which is totally ridiculous, but still when I talk to friends about this issue they are quick to propose that as the solution!

Honestly, this is the solution I'd like. Because I don't care about who is serving the movies, I want the movies. All of them in one place.

There's probably some law in economics that amounts to this, but it seems to me that competition is only useful if the goods/services being sold are commodities. Movies, or games, are an extreme example of non-substitutable goods, so as long as providers can get exclusive rights to sell/license them only on their platforms, competition becomes against customer interest, and monopoly is a better option. People are rational to observe that they gain nothing by Origin existing next to Steam, just like they don't gain anything by Netflix existing next to HBO and Amazon.

[meditate]

That is exactly the problem I was addressing, which is that the reason monopoly looks good is because the current systems we're looking are so entrenched and require DRM, which is a tool that actively and deliberately prevents platforms from innovating. Following this, it's no surprise that Netflix and Amazon are turning to making their own films, and that Origin only exists because Steam's monopoly means that EA couldn't negotiate acceptable licensing terms with Valve. Get rid of the DRM and there is plenty of reason to compete in ways that help customers. Then give them a way to easily transfer ownership between supporting platforms and everybody wins.

[petetnt]

Steam is not DRM though and they offer lots of DRM free games too[0]

https://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_Big_List_of_DRM-Free_Games...

[meditate]

The issue I have is not that the vendor (Steam, Netflix, etc) is imposing DRM, but that the copyright holders demand it, and that there are cases where the vendor gives into these demands. You're right that Steam doesn't do this in all cases, but in some they do.