“Piracy is not a pricing issue,” Gabe Newell, the co-founder of Valve, the company behind the world’s largest PC gaming platform, Steam, observed in 2011. “It’s a service issue.” Today, the crisis in streaming makes this clearer than ever. With titles scattered, prices on the rise, and bitrates throttled depending on your browser, it is little wonder some viewers are raising the jolly roger again. Studios carve out fiefdoms, build walls and levy tolls for those who wish to visit. The result is artificial scarcity in a digital world that promised abundance.
This hits the nail on the head…
I wonder if these greedy fuckers know this but don’t give a shit in favor of short term profits,or if they’re actually so dense and holed up in their own world disconnected from reality that they don’t see it?
In 2011. It’s been 14 years and for streaming portal things just got worse and worse.
They know it, but refuse to belive it, because they’ve built an empire on a faulty premise and can’t conceive that they may be wrong.
Source: two decades in the industry. But I got
betterout.I don’t know that I’d say they refuse to believe it, it’s more that there are short term goals and milestones to hit because literally every single industry is held to the standards and timelines of speculative investors rather than actual investors.
Everybody understands you should be servicing your audience and keeping them happy, and everybody is happy with you doing that… as long as it’s within the constraints of hitting quarterly goals. In a world where content routinely takes 3-5 years to make that is not a great fit.
Newell doesn’t have any investors to answer to so he gets to say those things when he’s in billionaire club. Everybody else just goes “no shit, Gabe” and keeps working on squeezing something out to keep pretending to have done better year on year.
It’s a remarkable example of the aggregation of incentives going against every single individual person involved, including those setting the incentives.
They don’t care. They know they’ll lose subscribers but they’ll make more money overall on the suckers that stick out the monopoly pricing. Same thing is happening in the auto industry where they sell less cars but are more profitable.
The problem is that all the competitors are enshittifying the same way at the same pace. If there was a holdout in a position to grow their platform we may at least go back to the days of “Netflix is all you need”.
As it is, it makes more sense to go back to physical media purchases, and I blame absolutely nobody if their disposable income and lack of box fetishes makes them think downloading the content is perfectly equivalent. The Plex server where I store all my physical media backups is by far the best streaming library I have access to, at least if you discount novelty as a factor.
