Comment by goosejuice
11 hours ago
It's been 27 years since Napster. People are still making albums and movies. I don't think piracy moves the needle in any meaningful way, not with enforcement anyway.
11 hours ago
It's been 27 years since Napster. People are still making albums and movies. I don't think piracy moves the needle in any meaningful way, not with enforcement anyway.
Look at a graph of music industry earnings. Earnings peaked around 2000 mostly from CDs, before plumiting because of piracy and the transition to digital. To the people trying to make a living, it changed everything in every meaningful way. Sure enforcement happened eventually, but only after setting everything on fire and changing consumer expectations to be unaligned with artists actually making money for people listening to their music (foreshadowing). The industry has maybe only just recovered with streaming revenue, only for AI to come in like a wrecking ball again.
It looks like it's recovered to inflation-adjusted levels of the 1980s, while consumers have more music than ever before. Perhaps the percentage of the money going to large corporations is higher than before?
It also got insanely cheap to produce and distribute music.
How is this relevant to the game industry?
Sharing cracked PC games has been a thing since the dawn of the industry, yet it has continued to grow and thrive.
Console…maybe? But good Switch emulators have been around for years, yet Switch hardware and exclusive games that ran better-than-native under emulation continued to sell in record numbers, and Sony has always delayed the release of PC ports of PlayStation exclusive titles to ensure healthy console sales.
I think it's still debatable whether piracy was the sole cause, or if it was a watershed moment for all the problems that already existed long before napster.
The internet sparked interest in independent music, artists had been fed up for a long time regarding earnings, and the music being made by the big labels was already pretty lackluster by this point in time.
The music industry is a racketeering front; they sabotage themselves.
If they actually embraced the digital era of mp3s rather than throwing lawsuits at the problem they would of been on top.
Music should be free, however these dinosaurs are stuck in tar and will continue to sue, hoard and milk their old ways restricting innovation and progress.
No sympathy for any of the wet teabags in the music industry.