Emulation and modding are about to be revolutionized

[HoloDust]

Norion said:

HoloDust said:

As Gabe Newell stated..."Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem".

So they need to come up with convincing arguments to keep their customers.

I don't know if they can do anything to avoid their business models getting disrupted in the coming years since it'll be very hard to beat the service of freely downloading a native port of their first party games on a platform you already own versus having to buy their hardware and the game on it. I personally don't really care about companies like Nintendo, Sony and so on getting harmed by these developments but it's gonna hit the gaming industry hard. 

I think ultimately it all boils down to convenience - most people just want to play game and not to worry about whether that game will glitch/crash/perform poorly due to being recomp, and also have access to patches, cloud saves, achievements and other stuff that legal copy gives you. Otherwise, Steam would collapse right away, given that everything released on it is cracked right away (if it relies on its DRM)...not to mention some being bold as folks behind Dawn of Bloodwalker and putting it on GOG as well right away, with no DRM at all.

And sure, there will be some impact from recomps, but it's not like industry never had problem with piracy on consoles (PS1, PS2 and DS come to mind) and still managed to be profitable and go on, though yes, this is much earlier in the cycle. But then again, TotK launched on PC before Switch, and that haven't really impacted sales that much.