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SvennoJ on 01 May 2017
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Safiir said:
Pemalite said:

DRM hasn't stopped piracy on the PC though. - But you know what has made piracy implode on the PC? Lower prices, more availability. You can thank Steam for that.
Apple ironically did the same for music with iTunes, music piracy used to run rampant in-part thanks to the likes of Napster, WinMX, Limewire etc'.
Apple made music more widely available at a lower price and almost eliminated the issue entirely.

And slowly streaming services are doing the same for TV and Film.

I cannot emphasize this strongly enough. People really need to get this through their heads - there's almost no piracy on PC because of Steam. Sure, most games are still released on torrent trackers but that's true for ps4 and xboxone games as well, even though neither of the two consoles is still cracked open. People just don't bother with them. It's vastly more convenient just to wait for a sale on Steam, or heck even use a dubious site like g2a. Not to mention all the bundles like humble bundle.

Lower prices and easy access allowed people that don't have a lot of money and could not afford to pay for the game to be able to buy those games at a later date. And that's all most people that pirated games wanted. There was really nothing nefarious about pirating in the past. It was mainly people that couldn't afford paying full price (read people in less developed countries).

So piracy has driven PC games prices down to the point most AAA games need console versions to stay alive?
Music is shit nowadays so not a good example either ;) Napster -> iTunes killed the well constructed album. Those are rare nowadays.
And I'm living proof of how false that last statement is.

Btw, there's almost no piracy on PC?
http://www.pcgamer.com/the-state-of-pc-piracy-in-2016/
2.5 billion game downloads on bitTorrents in 2014 by about 400 million unique users, mostly in the US, Brazil and UK.