People say it should be easier to buy stuff than pirate, and pirating is usually justified by companies basically making you not want to be their customer by being shitty at distributing things or charging too much. They say Gabe said this and I dont think he did? I think his quotes are all about the gaming industry specifically and I think he's just being asked about his and the company's reaction to piracy and it's obviously just "meh we dont see it as a problem cuz it doesn't really happen to us and this is why it doesn't happen to us so it shouldn't have to be a problem for anyone else". I think people take more out of what he said than is actually there.

I dont think he has a philosophy about piracy in general and also I dont think crunchyroll gets rid of anime pirates so its not like every other form of media is the same.

Although crunchy roll probably reduces anime piracy by a lot. But there's gonna still be a big chunk of ppl who piracy. Hardly anyone would pirate most games thanks to steam.

the industry right now is in full sisyphus mode, we pay to create new technologies to make our games need more expensive hardware to run, we always need more of something while not knowing what is it that we need. Pirating in my opinion doesnt change anything in the equation above. other than our time, money is our only tool inside capitalism. Start buying more indie games, stop falling in the capitalist trap and buy hardware you actually need. We need to get out of this slop cycle otherwise we are going to be getting retarded ubisoft and bethesda games till the day we die. I am a stem major and i can get most stuff done with extremely basic hardware. No you dont need to pirate the next assasins creed game to play in native 4k on your 4090

piracy being a service problem really is true though
there are a lot of things I have on Steam because it was outright easier vs pirating it... and a lot of things I don't because the opposite was true lol
yes, there will be a subset of the population that will just pirate regardless, either out of cheapness or complete disinterest in paying

piracy absolutely happens to steam games and steam's drm is really easy to dodge if you decide "ah, fuck valve" which is why a lot of games on the service use another DRM scheme

and crunchyroll absolutely took people who were going to random anime streaming sites and made them actually monetizable
your dedicated pirate probably wasn't swayed, but this moved people who pirated strictly out of necessity into generating income for them

honestly, it doesn't really matter that much if he said it

the most "source" version of this quote comes from this article - https://www.escapistmagazine.com/Valves-Gabe-Newell-Says-Piracy-Is-a-Service-Problem/

he is clearly considering piracy as an alternative to purchacing from a purely pragmatic lens. I don't think there is any judgment, just a view of piracy as a purely natural phenomenon which occurs when the conditions are correct. You may as well fight the tide, or get pissed off with gravity.

also the same conditions do apply to basically all media. music had the same situation where things like napster flurished because it was easier to get the music you wanted than to go to a cd store which may not even have the music you want, so now you have to drive to a different city in the hopes they have it, etc. (not even bringing up the impossiblity of getting cross national releases). itunes made getting music easier, and the spotify made it still easier, thus it has "won" the market.
similarly netflix became big because it was a better service than cable, now that streaming services are canibalizing themselves and becomeing worse services people are starting to turn back to piracy.
crunchy roll became big because it was a piracy website, and it used how big it became to become the dominant player in the legit service world. it hasn't kept up. You can't watch anything on crunchyroll, the subs are bad, the quality is middling, the apps suck, and there are plenty of other ways to watch any anime depending on amount of effort you want to put in for quality (including things like plex for mobile device streaming). if anything crunchyroll's failure to maintain it's dominance speaks truth to the service problem causing piracy.
and this hasn't touched on the kindle and audible stranglehold on ebooks and audiobooks, which again are better services than any other makeshift solution.

It's interesting how different digital distribution has turned out. Like for movies and tv, it turned out bad for the consumer with a million subscription services that's just cable again. With music, it's good for consumers but artists don't get payed. It seems like somehow steam's monopoly is the only one that's actually turned out "good enough" for everyone involved. I wonder why that is?

>>7
steam has the benevolent dictator effect going for it
someone who actually cares at the helm with the power to keep things on the right track

unfortunately, the benevolent dictator will have a successor, and the successor will almost certainly not be so benevolent

>>8
Don't worry they're working on AI-Gabe since Half-life 2's release.