obnoxious executive pay is its own problem, but even zeroing all that out wouldn’t do much for the financials. if you brought that $50m down to $0 and passed that savings on to consumers, each netflix subscriber would save pennies on their monthly bill

the music streaming platforms basically screw over the artists to make that feasible, with the excuse usually being that artists can make their real money touring and selling merch.

the cost of producing music is also infintesimal compared to that of producing film and television. the whole music industry itself is pretty small in comparison, yet Spotify costs about as much as a streaming TV service.

to scale that model up to film and TV would mean either a much higher base price, or a lot less overall content being made. these are viable paths, but both come with big trade offs.

this doesn’t really answer my questions, though.

netflix was able to afford that much content back then for two reasons

1. they were flush with capital from investors, spending more money than they were making to promote growth.

2. netflix wasn’t running new content, they were essentially licensing “reruns” of content that already had its primary run elsewhere.

basically, everyone got used to a certain lifestyle being subsidized by cheap capital and investors misplaced belief in perpetual growth. nobody has yet to explain to me how this could have been made sustainable.

the problem i have, that nobody has been able to really explain to me, is how the economics of streaming should be made to work.

content is insanely expensive to make. even with all of Netflix’s recent shitty changes, their operating margin is still only about 13%. that isn’t enough cash left over to fund production of every single show they don’t have. and it’s important that they actually be able to fund production, because unlike 10 years ago, most productions no longer rely on first runs on OTA or cable TV to make their money

so it seems to me there are three paths here:

1. the industry puts everything on a single service and dramatically increases the base price (remember cable? my parents paid twice as much for it in 2005 as i spend today on streaming services)

2. the industry puts everything on a single service and dramatically scales back production (remember OTA TV?) to fit within the budget afforded by a reasonable subscription price

3. studios branch off into competing streaming services

i’m not trying to start a fight or defend shitty corporate behavior (no one will ever get me to pay for ads), i just want to know how people think this could work in a way that balances out

This is mostly hearsay (supported by things the WGA said, so I trust it), but not all members of the AMPTP were happy with the strike going this long and wanted to negotiate a lot sooner.

Earlier this month there was talk of some members leaving so they could negotiate new contracts independently. This might have lit a fire under the ass of the holdouts, since the AMPTP losing someone big like Disney would significantly weaken their own negotiating power.

Arrogant billionaire complains about having to operate in a free market. Oh the irony…

I think this is why Denuvo has been successful. Where old DRM solutions got up in your face with onerous installation procedures, installing borderline rootkits, and ridiculous activation limits, Denuvo is essentially invisible to the end-user. It’s not ideal, but if developers are going to insist on shipping DRM I’ll take this over what we used to deal with any day of the week.

I doubt there’s any reliable data that confirms a significant loss in sales if they launched without Denuvo and its ilk.

There’s no publicly available hard data one way or the other. However the fact that publishers continue to use it while abandoning other forms of DRM suggests that there is probably some benefit.

I don’t really buy the argument that the only people who pirate content are people who would never pay for it to begin with. I know too many fellow software engineers that make comfy 6-figure salaries and pirate everything they can and spend money when it’s the only option.

It already played great on the Deck (Denuvo hasn’t been a problem for Wine/Proton for several years), but the removal of DRM is always a win in my book.

I’d like to see this trend of publishers stripping it out of their games after a couple years continue.

Single player works fine offline though

It stops real thieves “long enough”, which is why developers and publishers continue to use it. Lots of AAA games go uncracked for a year or more. The first few months or so are the most critical time for sales.

They’ve come a long ways since the '00s, when DRM schemes were both far more draconian and rarely effective for more than a few days.

This is my experience too. However, there is nothing special a game needs to do to support VRR. So the fact that VRR works fine in this game under Windows but not Linux makes me think there is a bug in Proton, the compositor, or the GPU driver.

I can say with 100% certainty that VRR is working as expected under Windows 11 with my RTX 3080. I haven’t tested in Fedora yet.

VRR works fine in Windows, maybe its a bug with Proton?