• No subscription fee to use Steam. Games are available to download and play offline. 3 clicks of the mouse to buy, install, and play a game. It’s so damn easy to use Steam, I don’t miss buying physical PC games and I certainly don’t miss rolling the dice on russian cracks.

      • Steam also has so many features that cracks usually can’t or don’t offer. Friends system, anticheat, workshop modding, cosmetics, multiplayer (although this is actually a case of it usually being locked behind Steam), fast updates, Proton, just to name a few.

    • Steam and Netflix are the sole reasons I stopped pirating as a teenager/young adult.

      I canceled Netflix long ago at this point and have been on the brink of going back to pirating films/TV. Too many streaming services… it’s just like TV packages before Netflix disrupted the model.

      • The only viable strategy for Netflix in the long run to stay in the game is to exploit people’s FOMO. You’ll sell way more subscriptions if you have a hot brand new show that everyone wants to watch. There will always be pirates, so if they want to stay one step ahead of them, they have to make sure there’s an abundance of quality programming on their platform coming out pretty much constantly.

        • Eh, that only goes so far. Any appeal to their original content is eroded by their practices surrounding streaming packages.

          I canceled when they bumped their price up a lot, and had it structured to where the HD streaming was paired with the package for a bunch of devices. It’s bullshit that they don’t allow HD streaming with a package with only 1 or 2 devices.

          I am also deterred by their password sharing crackdown, because I used to share subscription payments with my brother in another household.

          I read that they’re planning on doing away with the commercial free subscription, and I have no interest to resubscribe if it’s a payment plus commercial model.

          The convince of having quality original content in one place is nullified by their sleazy bullshit practices. There’s no way that their “convince” outweighs the little effort it takes to pirate the content IMO.