Opinion With the current PC Gaming landscape, we're going to have a piracy resurgence in the coming years

[708]

With the increasing number of companies wanting a piece of the pie and looking to 'compete' with Steam just by moneyhatting games and not offering on par/better services, a lot of people are going to wear their dusted pirate hat. A lot of pirates converted to paying consumers just because of the services Steam offers, be it regional pricing or simply convenience. I know I would still pirate if it wasn't for Steam. But the landscape is changing, people no longer can have all their games in one place and can't benefit from the benefits that Steam provides. And not all people are going to accept this and just keep buying stuff, especially in poorer countries where they could barely buy games already. They're just going to back to piracy. And one can call pirates scums and such things (though I wouldn't necessarily agree with that) but it won't change anything. The same thing happened to the TV industry when companies wanted a piece of Netflix's pie and it's going to happen in the game industry if the current landscape persists.

 

[TheVectronic]

I thought the same too, but I then I realized that unlike the TV industry, most game launchers are free to install & use with only Twitch Prime & Discord Store being the only platforms that requires you to have a subscription service for their games. A subscription program that only a handful of people enlist themselves for mostly as a bonus (Amazon Prime/Nitro) with no exclusives on those platforms as of yet.

If you had to pay up a fee to use those launchers then yes, I would agree that piracy would be the alternative towards getting the content. The common denominator among all the competition on the PC Marketplace is how it requires multiple log-ins to each one with the launchers cluttering up the computers just to play the games that you want.

That to me just seems to be a bit more work that not a lot of people might actually do.

 

[Gengis Khan]

Yeah, it's a serious possibility. I thought about it as well.
Not to say it's a rightful way to react, but it will probably happen regardless.

Copy protections and DRMs have hardly ever been effective deterrents and what drives most customers to stick to a legitimate copy is the sense of getting something valuable outside of the software itself: adding a game to their library, unifying their collection, centralizing the community (friendlist, chat, share of content, user guides). getting achievements and what else. As Newell used to say few years ago "Piracy is a service problem", not (strictly) a matter of pricing.

Once you start eroding that sense of perceived value out of a legal copy, it implicitly gets harder and harder to convince these people that "just downloading the game and be done with it" won't simply be a more convenient option.

 

[Ex-User (307)]

I thought the same too, but I then I realized that unlike the TV industry, most game launchers are free to install & use with only Twitch Prime & Discord Store being the only platforms that requires you to have a subscription service for their games. A subscription program that only a handful of people enlist themselves for mostly as a bonus (Amazon Prime/Nitro) with no exclusives on those platforms as of yet.

If you had to pay up a fee to use those launchers then yes, I would agree that piracy would be the alternative towards getting the content. The common denominator among all the competition on the PC Marketplace is how it requires multiple log-ins to each one with the launchers cluttering up the computers just to play the games that you want.

That to me just seems to be a bit more work that not a lot of people might actually do.

I agree that in general, the comparison isn't 1 to 1, and you're right the general barrier to entry for a launcher is much lower.

The one thing that does make it at least slightly similar is the regional pricing issue.

If new launchers aren't good about pushing regional pricing (and we get more devs that think regional pricing is "forced discounting"), and they don't have enough volume/clout/whatever to get regional payment processors on board...yeah, we're going to see a rise in people obtaining games in non-legal ways.

 

[gabbo]

With the increasing number of companies wanting a piece of the pie and looking to 'compete' with Steam just by moneyhatting games and not offering on par/better services, a lot of people are going to wear their dusted pirate hat. A lot of pirates converted to paying consumers just because of the services Steam offers, be it regional pricing or simply convenience. I know I would still pirate if it wasn't for Steam. But the landscape is changing, people no longer can have all their games in one place and can't benefit from the benefits that Steam provides. And not all people are going to accept this and just keep buying stuff, especially in poorer countries where they could barely buy games already. They're just going to back to piracy. And one can call pirates scums and such things (though I wouldn't necessarily agree with that) but it won't change anything. The same thing happened to the TV industry when companies wanted a piece of Netflix's pie and it's going to happen in the game industry if the current landscape persists.

As vectronic said, the launchers being free and accessible from the same device is different than region locked and subscription-based tv that have no overlap in programming. It will have an affect, but not cause the early to mid 2000s piracy wave that pre-steam saw. I wish I had numbers to back it up, but I have always felt the 'steam or bust' was mostly for niche places like ERA, and are about as effective as the COD Modern Warfare 2 boycott group

 

[Alextended]

Tons of people seem willing to do without Steam features given Fortnite not being on Steam and still growing so popular is what enabled the Epic store in the first place for example, but there are other great games that did fine without Steam, like Minecraft. If people turn to piracy I see it as an excuse, Steam still has tons of games so just buy your games there and don't even play what's elsewhere, if you want to play the games elsewhere then suck it up and pay for them same as you'd do on Steam. It's not like Steam is cheaper to point to financial issues (I'm sure any regional issues will be resolved for most services) since it's the same companies and publishers accepting to put their games on discount. If they discount on Steam they'll discount elsewhere just as well.

This is a separate issue to wanting every company to be more consumer friendly of course, people should definitely demand and pressure whatever service to get their customer support or refund policy or regional pricing or whatever else on par and that goes for Steam as well since it's not perfect itself.

I do find it weird that after all the criticism Steam received back in the day for not being friendly to most indies and excluding unknown gems from reaching that vast new userbase (which led to Greenlight to get indies onboard with self publishing based on user demand without needing an already accepted by Steam third party publisher to handle their game, which was also criticized for its own issues, which led to the current situation of no holds barred self publishing allowed), suddenly so many people seem to be falling for the PR narrative and craving for a regression with Epic's "curation" promoted as a good thing that will lead to a store with just good games or whatever, never mind all the good ones that slip through the cracks because Epic is still one company that can't speak with and even properly judge every release out there and the inevitability that when they grow to sell more than 20-100 games they'll have duds as well as they won't deny any partner's bad games after accepting/moneyhatting their good games to pimp the store with, the press has been doing Epic's PR so far and focusing only on the one thing Epic has to show for their service, their lower fee which doesn't even tell half the story in terms of developer friendliness. As if Epic won't put every game they can get their hands on their store eventually to profit off it forgetting everything they currently claim to stand for, or as if you don't have to research the products and see if you'll like them and buy blindly because Epic currently vouch for their quality or something crazy.

 

[Ex-User (307)]

Tons of people seem willing to do without Steam features given Fortnite not being on Steam and still growing so popular is what enabled the Epic store in the first place for example, but there are other great games that did fine without Steam, like Minecraft.

People are generally willing to go without features mostly in massively popular, zeitgeisty service-based games.

Is the League of Legends client a pile of spaghetti code, held together with duct tape, gum and staples? Absolutely. Do people play the game anyways? Sure. Why? Because there's no alternative. You either deal with their free garbage client, or you don't play.

Is the Epic Launcher a slow, laggy piece of garbage with zero features? Absolutely. Do people still boot it up to get to Fortnite? Definitely. Why? Because there's no alternative. You either deal with their free garbage client, or you don't play.

When you get away from online, F2P and/or service games, and especially once you get into actual paid full-price titles, people have more "options" to obtain games.

Does that mean piracy is right? No. Is it a market reality? Yes.

If people turn to piracy I see it as an excuse, Steam still has tons of games so just buy your games there and don't even play what's elsewhere, if you want to play the games elsewhere then suck it up and pay for them same as you'd do on Steam, it's not like Steam is cheaper either for most (I'm sure any regional issues will be resolved for most services at some point) since it's the same companies and publishers accepting to put their games on sale, if they put them on sale on Steam they'll put them on sale elsewhere just as well.

Piracy may be an "excuse" for a person that wants to play a game, but that doesn't mean it's wrong to try and account for those people. Gabe/Valve and the people at GOG have long contended (and are absolutely right) that piracy is a service issue.

"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," he said. "If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable."

The proof is in the proverbial pudding. "Prior to entering the Russian market, we were told that Russia was a waste of time because everyone would pirate our products. Russia is now about to become [Steam's] largest market in Europe," Newell said.

If you offer an accessible, affordable, hassle-free way to buy games, people will be much more willing and likely to buy games legally. That's how GOG and Valve turned Eastern Europe from a gigantic hellhole of piracy that no one else wanted to deal with, into a place where the market has thrived. Not only has the market thrived, the efforts to legitimize the market have also arguably led to an uptick in the overall development industry as well.

I don't even know what the second bolded line means. Steam is cheaper for most people than other storefronts, and it's definitely cheaper in a huge number of cases than the EGS. The only places that beat Steam's prices consistently are key-resellers, which only exist because Steam allows key-generation.

 

[fsdood]

Tons of people seem willing to do without Steam features given Fortnite not being on Steam and still growing so popular is what enabled the Epic store in the first place for example,

I find Fortnite to be more popular on consoles where I'm from since it's on literally everything and they can crossplay it with different versions. I don't think the average Fortnite player will even care about Epic's store so long they get to play Fortnite on their consoles.

 

[MegaApple]

I mean, Denuvo is already doing that.
Most of my friends have no problem pirating games, and waiting for Denuvo to get cracked only increases the anticipation.

I think Epic's biggest blow to the consumer side is snatching games for exclusivity.
Microsoft Windows store already has a good deal of games (even indies) and they only exclusives are their Xbox games. GOG's exclusives are older games whose publishers are long gone/shut down and Gwent (and better running games than more versions on Steam). Origin has its EA exclusives and allows games bought from Steam to be redeemed on Origin.
But all Epic has done is snatch games that very previously on Steam to their platform, with few surprises like Hades.