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I agree that Steam succeeds because it's easier than piracy, but I disagree about some of the details in that statement. I think you're overplaying the threats involved today. I pirated stuff when I was a kid, and it was relatively easy for someone who understood that scene to look for warning posts first. Today it's even easier given robust user rating and the camaraderie of pirate culture. It's very much an "us vs them" mentality, and it's hardly a solved problem. It seems that pirates are increasingly looking to provide a better service, whereas publishers seem intent on bad practices that either directly hurt, or can be used to hurt, legitimate users. In fact, many people pirate today because they don't want DRM or required connectivity. (The next SimCity will suffer from this, but I expect pirates to not have to worry about it after a few weeks.) In the case of Assassin's Creed II pirates couple play fine, but legitimate players couldn't due to DDOS attacks on servers required to let you play even single player. And in a hilarious example, an Ubisoft developer was even found to use a hack by a release group in an official patch: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2008/07/ubisoft-drm-snafu-remi... Given the relatively equal ease of piracy versus purchase, I would give the edge to the fact that developers are insanely integrated into the game buying community at every level. They've been blogging for years, they talk on Twitter, they visit 4chan and talk games, they even visit piracy sites themselves. Gamers like developers, and want them to succeed. But yes, I do think Steam even has a chance because it's as easy and (mostly) as useful as piracy. Ease and use are a large part of why Napster succeeded, and why Kazaa was so popular, but it's also the reason iTunes succeeds, though people associate it mostly with music. Google Play... I don't know many who even use it. Now, UltraVoilet is a wonderful digital attempt by film studios, on paper, but they cut their nose off to spite their face by making pack-ins that come with DVDs/Blu-Rays only guaranteed to last a year. And you can't buy from the studios, but instead a few other services that the common consumer has never heard of. Film companies really are still stuck in the past. Others have learned how to make their mediums work on the Internet, and these people have ignored the lessons. /edit: Been looking into UV more. It's actually an even better idea than I first thought. It seems that it's the bigger stores (Google, Apple, Amazon) that don't want to go along with it. That's a shame for us as customers. |