[vitally3643]

Steam effectively solved game piracy as far as I can tell.

The solution is: make purchasing legitimate copies an easier and better experience than piracy. That's it. That's all you need to do. There will, of course, always be piracy by those who can't afford to purchase the software or have other ideological goals, but for the vast majority of users, making it easy and pleasant to fork over cash for goods is how you stop them from stealing.

Meanwhile music, movies, and TV have decided to sprint in the exact opposite direction. It's now so onerous and expensive to even find let alone watch something that normal users are flocking to piracy. Not because it's cheaper, but because the experience is better in every conceivable way. To most people, the fact that you now own a real copy forever is merely a bonus. The real killer feature is that if you want to watch something it is always available. You can search for anything and get a result. Torrents don't usually go away on a rotating weekly basis. If you want something, it's available, and nobody gets in your way (if you do it right).

[rascul]

> The solution is: make purchasing legitimate copies an easier and better experience than piracy.

They didn't.

[allarm]

But they did it. Buying, installing, and updating the game is incredibly easy. That’s exactly why I haven’t downloaded pirated games for at least 15 years.