I don’t get it. People resort to piracy because the paid version sucks. I wanted to watch a movie from 1991 and no streaming service had it, and I pirated. Easy peasy.

Steam makes it difficult to pirate games. Besides making it easy to install and play, there are the external things like reviews, achievements, community to upload used content or talk with others, mods, easy updates, and many steam events like sales.

On one hand, Netflix was the piracy killer, and ultimately forced out of that position. They started producing and purchasing their own content because they knew all major Hollywood studios would start their own walled gardens and pull their content.

On the other hand, Netflix can suck a bag of dicks because they — just like all publicly traded companies — solely exist to extract as much value from consumers as possible. They don’t exist to produce art or entertainment. They exist to produce ever increasing profits — FOREVER — like a parasite. They enshittified all on their own accord, and would’ve abused and exploited their position if they were able to host all content or attain a monopoly to begin with.

Lol… Netflix complaining about piracy.

They’ve reached the “live long enough to become the villain” stage of corporate growth.

Netflix: “No one could have seen this coming.”

It is not the “free” in entertainment. I have no problems paying for a proper streaming service. It is a service, after all, and the people who made the content deserve to be paid.

BUT: I can understand that people turn to piracy when the quality of the product (streaming service) degrades beyond recognition while prices rise through the ceiling. I can understand that people are pissed when they already subscribe three “big” streaming services, and then notice that the film they just wanted to watch is no longer available in any of the three, because it moved off to yet another provider, but in turn they are also force-fed brainless ads like one would expect in a free to view service.

Let’s see in the last few years Netflix has DOUBLED their price from about $12 to $24/month. Dumped tons of beloved shows. Added fucking commercials (literal content poison). Other services have shredded series so that some seasons are on one service and some are on another. Paramount has (I think) 3 different services with their content (Peacock, Paramount+, Showtime) which blows my mind. What’s difficult to compete with is insatiable greed. Oh and did I forget to mention the latest trend of “disappearing” content that you literally bought??!! The hubris required to even make that statement is mindblowing.