Sony is erasing over 550 movies from PlayStation libraries without offering a single refund. If clicking "Buy" only grants access until a corporate licensing deal expires, the service is fundamentally broken.
It was a pricing issue when I was 12 and didn’t have a job. It’s a service issue when I’m almost 30 and I want to buy it but you won’t let me or you make it more complicated than piracy.
With video games I haven’t pirated a game in years because Steam and GOG make it (relatively) painless and most of the issues that arise are not even Steam’s fault and are usually the big developers delisting games or ending support.
Movies and shows? I’d have to do research to figure out who currently has the rights to the media and pick my streaming platform accordingly. Hell, some shows and movies series’ are split between different streaming services altogether. If I decide to watch said show on a PC they’ll lower the quality to 720p and I can’t change it. If I want to watch something on the go it’ll get blocked half the time even if I have it pre-downloaded on my phone. And if I want to “buy” it I have to figure which services are selling it and even than it will restrict how I can watch it. And now we have to worry about you removing things that we paid for from our libraries? Go fuck yourself. Even if Steam delists a game from their store you can still play it if it’s in your library.
Meanwhile, if I want to watch the same show/film jy “alternative ways”, I just go to stremio, search for it, and watch it. No questions asked, no geoblocks, no services to search for in them and painless overall.
It IS a service problem because it really is harder to watch it legally.
I used to buy a lot of films on VHS and later on DVD.
Then came bluray which was purposefully locked down tight so I couldn’t rip them and I couldn’t even play discs from other regions, plus the whole anti-circumvention legislation passed at the time meant that even after somebody cracked its DRM it was hard to get your hands on good tools to rip the disks.
As by then home internet speeds were high enough, I switched to pirating that kind of content.
Streaming came along but it was already obvious back then that the customer didn’t own the media - you couldn’t just download a non-DRM-locked video file and watch it whenever and wherever you wanted because nobody would sell that to you, they would “keep it” for you in their systems or send it DRM locked and kept control of when you could access it with some kind of “phone-home” unlocking mechanism - so I never subscribed to any streaming services.
I have literally pirated all video content since the mid 00s.
Meanwhile, like you, in contrast and thanks mostly to GOG, even though I can pirate my games, I just buy them instead. Steam is a bit more iffy because they have the whole “phone-home” control thing and although their DRM isn’t really tightly locked and you can easily go around it, in my view the intention is there to restrict your freedom, so I’ve only bought a handful of games on Steam (and, curiously, recently I had to turn to piracy because one of those games wouldn’t run on Linux but a pirated version of it ran just fine).
I’m perfectly willing and capable of buying the content, but it has to be free for me to use (same as in the old days, before phone-home DRM, a Game or Movie DVD was free for me to use) and in my possession not in a “trust me this is yours (but not really as per an obscure paragraph in a Terms & Conditions agreement which is 50 pages of legalese)”.
This is a big reason why I have a problem with streaming services these days. With anime, it can get worse when some services only stream in Dubbed or Subbed where you want the opposite. And even with a great fiber optic internet connection the streaming sites will reduce your playback quality like mentioned above, to the point where a few times now I’ve opted to find and download the show elsewhere even though I’m subscribed.
Or the subs on the anime is AI generated garbage that isn’t accurately translated. I’d rather wait a few days and find a fan sub. Though that’s hard these days. Seems like even pirated copies of shows just rip from Crunchyroll anyway. Which go figure, Crunchyroll is owned by Sony last I checked.
It was a pricing issue when I was 12 and didn’t have a job. It’s a service issue when I’m almost 30 and I want to buy it but you won’t let me or you make it more complicated than piracy.
With video games I haven’t pirated a game in years because Steam and GOG make it (relatively) painless and most of the issues that arise are not even Steam’s fault and are usually the big developers delisting games or ending support.
Movies and shows? I’d have to do research to figure out who currently has the rights to the media and pick my streaming platform accordingly. Hell, some shows and movies series’ are split between different streaming services altogether. If I decide to watch said show on a PC they’ll lower the quality to 720p and I can’t change it. If I want to watch something on the go it’ll get blocked half the time even if I have it pre-downloaded on my phone. And if I want to “buy” it I have to figure which services are selling it and even than it will restrict how I can watch it. And now we have to worry about you removing things that we paid for from our libraries? Go fuck yourself. Even if Steam delists a game from their store you can still play it if it’s in your library.
Meanwhile, if I want to watch the same show/film jy “alternative ways”, I just go to stremio, search for it, and watch it. No questions asked, no geoblocks, no services to search for in them and painless overall.
It IS a service problem because it really is harder to watch it legally.
I used to buy a lot of films on VHS and later on DVD.
Then came bluray which was purposefully locked down tight so I couldn’t rip them and I couldn’t even play discs from other regions, plus the whole anti-circumvention legislation passed at the time meant that even after somebody cracked its DRM it was hard to get your hands on good tools to rip the disks.
As by then home internet speeds were high enough, I switched to pirating that kind of content.
Streaming came along but it was already obvious back then that the customer didn’t own the media - you couldn’t just download a non-DRM-locked video file and watch it whenever and wherever you wanted because nobody would sell that to you, they would “keep it” for you in their systems or send it DRM locked and kept control of when you could access it with some kind of “phone-home” unlocking mechanism - so I never subscribed to any streaming services.
I have literally pirated all video content since the mid 00s.
Meanwhile, like you, in contrast and thanks mostly to GOG, even though I can pirate my games, I just buy them instead. Steam is a bit more iffy because they have the whole “phone-home” control thing and although their DRM isn’t really tightly locked and you can easily go around it, in my view the intention is there to restrict your freedom, so I’ve only bought a handful of games on Steam (and, curiously, recently I had to turn to piracy because one of those games wouldn’t run on Linux but a pirated version of it ran just fine).
I’m perfectly willing and capable of buying the content, but it has to be free for me to use (same as in the old days, before phone-home DRM, a Game or Movie DVD was free for me to use) and in my possession not in a “trust me this is yours (but not really as per an obscure paragraph in a Terms & Conditions agreement which is 50 pages of legalese)”.
This is a big reason why I have a problem with streaming services these days. With anime, it can get worse when some services only stream in Dubbed or Subbed where you want the opposite. And even with a great fiber optic internet connection the streaming sites will reduce your playback quality like mentioned above, to the point where a few times now I’ve opted to find and download the show elsewhere even though I’m subscribed.
Or the subs on the anime is AI generated garbage that isn’t accurately translated. I’d rather wait a few days and find a fan sub. Though that’s hard these days. Seems like even pirated copies of shows just rip from Crunchyroll anyway. Which go figure, Crunchyroll is owned by Sony last I checked.
Happy cake day!
Thanks!