Yea I tried signing up to Netflix again since they had added the new plans and ads. Didn't last more than the first/initial month/payment. What hot garbage that experience was. The 90s experience of having a cable person come over and install something would have been more user friendly. They lost a lot of good will from me as a customer that day, I'm not sure I'll ever go back.

I'm keeping them for my kids until that password thing actually happens, then I am gone.

I buy steam games, even ones I've already pirated, for a few reasons.

• Quick and easy downloads

• Seamless updates

• Almost all my other purchased games in one place.

• Cloud saves

• Durability, just knowing my games will be available to download on my next PC for the foreseeable future.

And I pirate just about everything I watch mainly because I'm not willing to play musical subscriptions to watch the shows I want to see at the end of a long day.

If the film industry had a service that offered a similar experience to a Plex share, I'd pay quite a bit for it. But instead they have this system designed to extract maximum value from every viewer, and I'm tired of it.

Gabe Newell was right on the money when he said piracy is a service issue, not a price issue.

Yep, and when netflix took off piracy took a dive because of how good it was. Then every studio decided they wanted their piece of the streaming pie so pulled all their content off netflix and released their own streaming service, so now we're basically back to having to pay $100 a month to get access to everything, just like we were with cable before netflix changed the game. Shockingly, piracy has shot up again.

These companies are so stupid and greedy.

The only games I'll pirate are ones that are no longer available to buy, because what else am I supposed to do?

at least with cable you can bundle channels

For about the same price as it currently costs to bundle all the major streaming platforms. Plus, cable never had anything near the amount of content we have now on streaming.

I think people who compare cable to streaming don't remember what it was like before streaming

I think a much better comparison than Steam would be Spotify.

I use Plex for all my movies and TV shows for the same reasons you mentioned. All my stuff can be in one place instead of having to pay for Netflix, Hulu, Peacock, Disney+, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, and whatever other fucking shit is out there.

Plex also supports music libraries, but I don't use that feature. Why? Because Spotify has literally 99.9% of all the music I want to listen to, and aside from maybe like Garth Brooks, the other 0.1% is on Youtube. Spotify did it right by just having a basic service that you can pay for and get everything you want. If I had to subscribe to Spotify, Tidal, Napster (Still a thing I guess?), and 4 other services just to access all the music I listen to, I'd go back to piracy.

With Spotify slowly starting to reach a limit in subscribers, it's unfortunately only a matter of time until they start pulling what Netflix is doing and finding new ways to get money from customers.

best way to stop piracy is by offering a more convenient alternative. I generally for example don’t pirate video games available on Steam

I have towed this line for years. Recently Battlefield 2042 was available on steam for a great price so I snapped it up. I'd played it at release via a 1 month trial of EA play and it was absolute trash.

The game is totally fixed! The problem I have, is that I bought it on steam...and it forces me to install and keep myself logged in to the EA app anyway. It fails to launch the game every single time. I have to reboot my computer, manually log out of EA and log back in. It is an absolute shitfight, because EA gargle balls all day.

My point is, I bought the game on steam and I got absolutely duped. I'm all for a bigger library, but not if it means I have to install and use the other crappy apps anyway. Such a disappointment, I won't be so quick to buy on steam anymore unless they implement a great big flashing red warning that the game is not actually on steam at all.

Gabe Newall said himself that piracy is never a price problem, but a service problem.

Also stopped pirating games when steam came around. And I stopped pirating shows and movies with the rise of streaming services. Now though, I'm looking into standing up a media server.

You still can...

I think Hulu has a decent bundle with Disney, and Paramount with Showtime isn't bad.

That's like 4 for 20 bucks. And lots of cell plans come with one free. So it wouldn't be hard to get a lot of options for 20-40, which is still way cheaper than cable.

Netflix is just starting to get real expensive. If they'd have kept some of their originals from the last couple years I wouldn't think of canceling, but since they cancel those shows a week after a season drops, I'll probably drop Netflix soon.

i have crappy internet and there's no way to preload a movie with netflix so the service is useless to me. i have to torrent

Chargeback

Change the password before you deactivate again?