The Tragic Fall Of µTorrent
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 14 май 2024
- Become smarter in 5 minutes by signing up for free today: cen.yt/mbnationsquid - Thanks to Morning Brew for sponsoring today’s video.
Just as the internet was finally planting its roots within computers all across the world in the early 2000s, people began to take advantage of it in ways which before weren’t possible. The World Wide Web was continuing to evolve, and so were the people using it. File sizes got bigger, but for many, internet speeds and bandwidth remained the same, which meant that downloading was going to become more difficult: What do we do? The answer to that question was found in a program which dominated computers of hardcore internet users throughout the duration of the decade: uTorrent. This software took advantage of a revolutionary technology that was introduced only a couple of years prior. The technology in question is in the name: “torrenting,” and uTorrent was about to become the program that would popularize its use for the masses. Websites could now provide downloads the size of video game files at virtually no cost on the host’s end. The internet was about to change forever.
It wouldn’t take long for uTorrent to become the face of online file-sharing, the go-to for all your downloading needs. Want to finally get that one file you’ve been trying to find, for years? uTorrent was the solution…Until things took a turn. uTorrent was one of those programs that took a devastating fall in popularity, but not in the way that you might think. I mean, the numbers boldly state otherwise, but the people don’t. uTorrent went from being a pop-culture icon of the internet to something that nobody talked about overnight, due to a series of both long-term and short-term decisions which, for a long time, remained unrectified. What happened? What is the tragic story behind uTorrent? A program still quite popular, but arguably now in the shadow of its former self.
The old tale behind uTorrent’s prevalence on the internet is a very curious one. As we mentioned, a series of very strange events lead to the program becoming both popular and unpopular at the same time. The number of uTorrent downloads was affected, but not enough to effect competition. Though the program itself is just not talked about anymore, as if people don’t like associating themselves with it. Even the renowned package management system Ninite stopped servicing uTorrent in around 2013. It has essentially become the Voldemort of the internet: The Bittorrent Client Who Must Not Be Named, and it all boils down to three things: poor marketing and business decisions, the lack of regard to adapting with constantly growing technology, and on top of all this, the need of such a program simply becoming less needed as time went on. As you could probably see, some of these factors are a bit outside of uTorrent’s control, but when accompanied with the other problems that were exclusive to uTorrent, they essentially act as the final nail in the coffin.
It is important to note that the components surrounding uTorrent’s lack of involvement with adapting to the times and its controversial business changes, do go hand in hand, and it all has to do with how and why uTorrent was even created in the first place.
Website: www.nationsquid.com/
Forums: www.nationsquid.freeforums.net
Patreon: / nationsquid
Merchandise: teespring.com/stores/squids-s...
Google +: just kidding.
Discord: / discord
Beauty Flow by Kevin MacLeod
Link: incompetech.filmmusic.io/song...
License: creativecommons.org/licenses/b...
Wholesome by Kevin MacLeod
Link: incompetech.filmmusic.io/song...
License: filmmusic.io/standard-license
ENJOY THE PROGRAM.
All the people correcting my pronunciation of µTorrent because they didn't watch the video. 😍😍😍😍😍
Morning Brew has actually made the news interesting for me! ☕📰 Thanks Morning Brew for my daily news perk - sign up for free here cen.yt/mbnationsquid
video hasnt even premiered yet lmao
Ütorent
please tell them that I CANT SUBSCRIBE
@@tazz1911er well i translated that and it just turned into rental
I hate news
Remember guys, It's always morally correct to pirate Adobe products
You fucking bet it is
Fuck adobe products. I don't want to pay 50$ for just 1 month of use. I'd rather download a old version of it
"And the Lord did say unto them - "My children. It is important that you remember that it is always morally correct to pirate Adobe products." And it was good." - Fuckadobeus, 4:20.
@@GumSkyloard LMAO
its always morally correct to pirate
Just remember this: Torrenting is also a way to preserve content that will most likely dissapear from streaming services.
Ikr, what IF the internet goes down (i mean it probably won't but still) everyone who had downloaded content would still be able to access it.
Wtf is this creator on about? I don't watch tv series and how in the world could I download a software to edit music, using streaming services? Why should I pay it, since Only the artists should name the tools that helped created the thing they worked on?
Music, sure. It was pirated before internet, from audio cassettes, nothing new.
uTorrent stays, just delete this dumb video (and my comment, along with it).
@@outstanding1448 is english not your first language
@@user-bx9sg1qr9x , how can you tell?
@@outstanding1448 because you misunderstood the entire video
I like how you referred to malware companies as "malware providers" as if its a service lol
Though obviously illegal, in business terms, some could actually be considered such, lol. There absolutely are single and groups of black hats offering their malware or work as service. Malware or hacking software being offered in exchange of a monthly payment isn't a new thing.
MAaS. Malware as a service
Actually, malware as a service has become a pretty big thing on the dark web, so yup they literally are providers of the malware it's up to the client to spread it 😅
Until someone makes a single streaming platform for all movies/shows that comes at a reasoanble price, and where you know your favourite show or movie would never be removed, then I'd say piracy still has a place. I've seen a few instances recently of people losing access to shows (even ones they've directly bought digitally) just because of licencing agreements between the creator and provider. A shop won't break into your house and steal back the DVD, so why is it "okay" for a digital platform revoke something you've bought?
So like Netflix before the Streaming-Balkanisation?
i miss the times when netflix was just that, i miss them so much
Torrenting isn't on the decline. I think it's on a parabolic trajectory. The rise of greedy streaming companies means it's gonna become normal again.
DDLs are good again tho
Stremio is filling the streaming service niche using torrent technology. If your ISP is snitchy, make sure you wear a VPN.
@@Dad...... depends on the country you are in. In my country, everyone pirates stuff, to the point no one uses any VPN’s nothing. And ųTorrent is as popular as ever where i am.
@meme man whats your point?
@@zarabatanaproductions9240 I'd imagine his point is "lucky you". We have to pay for good VPNs with servers in countries like yours to not get threats sent to our ISPs.
Gabe Newell really said it best, “One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.”
And that's why they'll always be on top.
Disgaea theif pfp :D
so that's why people can't play multiplayer on cracked steam games.
(yes i understand that you can't play multiplayer because your game isn't connected to your steam account)
@@alduinfr some games have fixes, like ROR2
And look, I paid for Risk of Rain 2 in xbox, I bought to game with my money, I don't feel like I'm pirating when I cracked it to play with friends on PC, I did pay for the game once after all...
Gaben GOAT 🐐🐐
But honestly, ever since Steam expanded their payment method in my country, I never again pirated any games that's available on Steam.
Torrenting at a decline /= "piracy" at a decline. Plenty of people use "pirate streaming services", like those movie sites you mentioned earlier in the video. And good for them. ;)
I'm pretty sure torrenting is on the rise again as the streaming service market has fragmented into dozens of little pieces. Netflix used to have pretty much everything, now you need at least five streaming services because thay all have exclusive content you want to watch. F that. I canceled Netflix when they blocked account sharing. Why should I pay for four users when in reality only one user is allowed at a time? And no, I don't want the cheapest option with one user and crappy video and audio.
These media corporations don't understand why Netflix became so popular in the first place. It had pretty much all the content and it was priced quite affordably, especially as you could share the account with three other people. But somehow these delusional idiots think they can charge the same amount of money for a fraction of the content on their own streaming platform.
There needs to be one streaming service which has all the shows and movies and it can't cost more than 10€ per user per month if there is no account sharing. Then I'll stop torrenting again. How hard can it be to make one service which shares the revenue between different publishers based on each user's watch time? If the service costs 10€/mo and one month I watch 50% HBO content, 30% Disney content and 20% Netflix content, then HBO gets 5€, Disney 3€ and Netflix 2€. Right now I'm watching everything for free. It's their choice to provide people with a better service than what you get by torrenting.
Honestly, you get on a few private trackers and you'll be horrified at the time you wasted on "pirate streaming services" and all the malware, porn ads, and scams they present you with.
You should get real-debrid it's life changing fr
@@delusionnnnnYup. I see people recommending them all the time on TikTok. Like no. Get on a private tracker.
Actually, when uTorrent turned onto an ads-stained crap, I just changed to qbittorrent. It's open-source, meaning nobody can just ruin it.
As someone who grew up with 56k AOL Internet... I'll tell you that it was longer than 10 minutes. I remember setting WAV files to download and then leaving to get lunch, hoping they'd be done when i got home haha
Yeah that instantly stuck out to me as incorrect when I watched this haha
WAVs. Wow, those were about 10MB a minute. I remember targeting 128 kbps MP3s because they were about 1MB per minute.
I was also using the T1 line at my... educational facility... to DL and then used Winzip to make spanned archives on 3.5 floppy disks to get them home. WAV files would have murdered my productivity.
same, I remember leaving 10-15mb videos downloading over night
this is why mp3 is better
An MP3 song back in the dial-up days took at least 30 minutes. I think people have forgotten how bad dial-up actually was. Probably most people watching this video today weren't even alive back then. There was a time that if you had an ISDN line (a precursor to DSL), you could download a song in 10 minutes and you were one of the lucky ones.
I spent 6 months when I was 12 years old downloading Blair Witch Project 2 on KaZaa on a 56k modem, coming home every day to see how much further it had downloaded, it became an absolute obsession seeing that one movie. Imagine my utter disappointment when it eventually finished and it turned out to be absolute shite.
I feel bad for laughing at this.
I feel bad you had 56k modem internet for 6 months or longer.
After 3 months on dial up, I upgraded to cable modem service. It wasn't real fast at first. I think 3-5 Mb down, 768 Kb up but a 4 min song that took 26 min, took 45 seconds or less. On cable modem, you would have only spent about 3 nights before finding out Blair Witch Project 2 was shite.
Another thing I did in the mid 2000's was rent movies and rip them to the HDD, then burn them to DVD, or watch then delete. Back then, movies did take a long time to torrent compared to renting and ripping. This way, they were at least compensated for my rental.
Blair Witch Project 2 and The Book of Secrets. What fucking book?!!?!!!
It took me 3 weeks to get scary movie.. lol
6 months lol do fvck off
Gaben once said “Pirating is a service problem”
He was completely right cause nobody wants to pay $50 a month for Adobe
Edit: Looks like piracy is back on the menu now that stuff is getting too expensive again for an average/low quality product or even turning into a subscription service
We are talking about a genious mastermind who quitted his job at Miscrosoft to create his own gaming masterpiece and his own multi-millionaire company.
Piracy is quite common in Antarctica
@@betorockmetal Unfortunately he still can't count to 3 though.
The full quote is that it's a service problem, NOT a price problem. Saying people don't want to pay $50/month for Adobe is about price, not service. (And for the record, Bacon Newell was wrong, it's most definitely about price before it's about service for most people, only rich people prioritize convenience over price.)
@@jaytomson3492 worse, i can't count to 2
I’ve been saying this for years, if you get a service that makes watching movies cheaper or playing video games cheaper people will want to be legal and pay for their services. Since the launch of Netflix and Spotify, we saw a decline in pirating. Ever since the launch of Disney + when I realized that the publishers would want in on the Netflix pie and that prices would skyrocket and that would lead to more people pirating again. Statistics now show that pirating has increased again. If corporations actually learned from their mistakes in the 80’s and 90’s when movies and music became too expensive, if they had been less greedy and let Netflix have most shows then people wouldn’t download. Corporations and corporate greed never learn.
exactly. Music, videos and games need to be cheap (and can be, as they are consumed by many, many people!). Also, using the legal service has to be more convenient than pirating the thing. Steam is a great example. Why bother wasting half a day to research for a good torrent, virus check and hassle with the unpacking/install of it when you can just download it in 15 Minutes from Steam. Quite a lot of commercial software vendors have yet to understand this.
Now that Spotify has decided to charge us users for even selecting or seeking or looping songs, many people will happily go back to pirating music.
I'm surprised he didn't mention the government's stand against internet piracy in the early 2010s, which directly affected the ease of torrenting. By partner with isps to detect torrent traffic. Isps would throttle and torrent traffic or send to warning emails for downloaded certain torrents which could ultimately lead to termination or internet service.
Streaming services caused a decline in pirating, but it's also going to cause a comeback. So many shows and movies are spread out over so many services. Everyone wants to set up their own streaming service. Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Disney, Universal. I'm not subscribing to 20 fucking services to watch a show. Screw that.
I can understand having 5 services but no one wants to have 40 services at the same time
Very much so!
Especially since I would put something on my list on netflix to watch later only for it to be removed when I go to watch it -_-
@@TankEngine75 It's so annoying to find a show/movie you want to watch only to find out it's exclusively on some streaming service you're not subscribed to. I'm not getting my credit card out, I'm getting my pirate hat.
@@NordRageLevicus That's another reason. Shows come and go all the time. There's no guarantee they'll ever come back or won't appear on a different streaming service you'll have to subscribe to if you want to keep watching. When they took Star Wars and DIsney movies off of Netflix back when Disney+ came out, it didn't make me wanna subscribe to Disney+, it made me want to cancel my Netflix subscription and start torrenting again.
No problem, just don't watch the show unless it's available on the streaming platform of yout choice.
Years ago, uTorrent was known as "green steam" over here in Latin America lol.
I see torrenting coming back, but not with games or software, but thanks to greedy streaming services.
i didnt know gordon freeman could talk
@@PythonWood its called typing
@@zherean42069 ive been under a rock for a decade and trust me, i have no fuckig clue what typing is
and yes i edited thsi comment
same dude, same
and yes i edited this comment
If there's any medium that's the next big piracy target, it's TV and movies. So much stuff being bounced back and forth between different services or just not being available at all.
Minor correction: torrenting is still p2p technology, but simply distributed. P2P merely refers to the fact that you are not using a central hosting server (party A uploads for party B to download afterwards), but are circumventing that so that party A, one of the peers, is able to connect directly, just as you describe, with further *peers*. Even further: if A and B have different parts of the stream (which they could have received from C), they can become both up- and down-load peers to each other, while taking the load off C.
Your video is also poignant, because when you posted it, you already mentioned that price increases, balkanisation and reducing of catalogues may lead to a return of pirating. Only 1 year later, and the streaming services are in a self-inflicted, dramatic free-fall. I wouldn't be surprised if torrent traffic is back on the rise!
Also .torrent files don't work the way he's describing. IIRC they point you to a torrent site where you find peers and if the site is down, you will not be able to download anything. For a truly decentralized network you need something like DHT or similar networks (Kademlia, etc)
I don't know why he didn't mention Ed2k if you're going to journalise anything regarding p2p file sharing. This program seems like junk journalism.
The one thing that annoyed me were the thousands of fake files out there, waiting for hours to grab a movie only to find out it was a porno or sometimes just a black screen was so bloody annoying that was until torrent clients started to let you preview what you were grabbing be it music, movies, programs etc. When that happened it was a god send and saved me many hours on fake downloads.
fun fact : people after pirating sometimes buy the actual program after pirating it to support the dev's. but for adobe products, nothing changes.
True. Here in post-Soviet countries games feel more expensive than in western countries, so people often pirate the game, check if it's worth buying, and when they have free money, they buy it just to support devs or to unlock content that isn't yet in the pirated version.
@@thedoczekpl Yea in other country’s it does feel expensive ,
ps : ill never buy adobe products for 120$ per month
@@omzcore I'll teach my kid to crack Adobe programs before I teach him to walk
Bruh what the fuck are you pirating shit for if you're going to buy it anyway?
@@FreemanWelterweight lmao
"Torrenting itself is not illegal. Torrenting copyrighted content is illegal"
Short sentence that explained the problem
what problem
@@diamondfrieza5391 that’s not how it works
@@diamondfrieza5391 “if you know how to avoid being tracked, anything’s legal” anything is not legal if you know how to get away from it
By your logic, murder is legal if they don’t catch the person? 🫤
@@diamondfrieza5391 there's not much to know. nobody is going after individuals nowadays, you are good as long you aren't making money off of it. your VPN is pretty meaningless.
@@holleey Not entirely true. Here in Germany some backward companies still prioritize dishing out fines to individuals whenever they detect that you downloaded copyrighted material (mostly music). They do this by shadowing some p2p protocols (i.e. participating in a swarm w/o actually transferring data, but in order to log your ip).
Some lawyers make it their business to help the user in such cases, because the claims are more often than not ridiculously taxed and are often hard to provide legally binding evidence for. It is advisable for anyone who finds themselves in this situation to pay such a lawyer instead of trying to handle the claims themselves, because it's extremely easy to incriminate oneself due to the intricacies of the associated laws and amendments the lobbyists have been able to push through.
Typically however, the lawyer handles the case by being accomodating yet clueless toward anything regarding the claims in question. Eventually the companies realize that they're unable to build a proper case, that the following ups on the claims are costing them more than they likely could bring in and give up.
leechers are not just people who own a copy of the file. Leechers are people who only Download, with no upload ratio. leeching bandwidth.
14:11 When they put ads in it I dropped it in a heart beat and never looked back.
I’ve seen a theory that the ammount of people who pirate content hasn’t lowered, but instead the ammount of people who dont pirate has increased. In ye olden days of the internet, most people online where computer nerds who knew what they where doing, but now everyone’s online.
And with less of the internet’s population pirating, it’s harder for new people to find out how
Agreed
exactly. ive only recently been serious about the internet but im honestly scared to pirate, not because i fear it's illegality (nobody really cares if you pirate nowadays) but because im not sure how to without getting 300 viruses
@@weedboyjjofficial6350 Just aim for the ones with more seeds, dodge the suspicious file extensions that don't really belong, and use trusted sitres/trackers
@@geoyt8321 Not always the case, I've seen viruses with stuff like 20~40k seeds before. They probably use bots or smth to fake seeds. Sadly that's not good advice to give to a layman bc he'll get caught if he doesn't know what he's doing. Best advice would probably be to only torrent inside a VM and use a virus scan service like virustotal on every file you DL.
@@weedboyjjofficial6350 Not that I would know anything about this, but I hear that you should always use a no-logs VPN so that the download is untraceable (and yes some countries absolutely do care), and apparently you can also check the file extensions to make sure that what you're downloading is not a .dll or .sys file. Basically if a file doesn't have a .txt, .mp4, .png, or .mkv extension, trash it. Or so they say. Bonus points if you're using a Linux distro.
Love the video. Pirating Adobe products is always morally correct
But most people don't know how. There are no actual instructions. I just go to torrent for movies and I wished I can download applications.
@@victoriannecastle just add crack.
@@d3vilmaycry25 Just a little over here and SNJOOOORT. That's the good stuff... Oh you meant software.
@@victoriannecastle pre-activated/pre-cracked software exist. I use some, and all of them are verified, so 100% safe.
@@TsunaXZ
But there are sometimes pre cracked softwares that have instructions and then when I tried to follow the instructions it didn't work like in the TXT file provided to insert key gen for example its frustrating sometimes when I try to do this with a paid software that has free 30 days but I don't want to make new account every months
You know why I uninstalled it , the first time it shipped with malware and never looked back , deluge does the same thing, they ruined it with one release.
In Germany, torrents never really took off in public. It wasn't the choice for pirates, either because lawyers acted as seeders, logging every IP address, and sued everyone in a fully automated process. So basically, if you started an illegal torrent download in like 2008, you could have been sure to get a friendly letter in the mail a few weeks later. Same went for P2P like eMule. So basically, pirates moved on to one click hosters. Torrent only became a thing for closed and trusted groups.
im pretty sure they still do that but people just use VPNs
My mate's brother divides his work time between Derby in England and Berlin. He told me a few years back if I torrented at the rate I do here in Germany I would have been caught by the authorities long ago. I'm glad I live where I live.
There's legal torrents. Like a Linux or BSD distro. Or massive encrypted files full of classified Chinese jet fighter research.
@@abebuenodemesquita8111 There's no need really. German Piracy hit one click hosters really early and took off. I remember the time when you as a pirate could easily earn money just uploading annonymously on rapidshare. Although germans use torrents for pirating sometimes we have plenty alternatives.
@@xDJxGNOMx remember megaupload? good times
Valve got it right. If people are going to the trouble of pirating your content, you aren't doing a good enough job of delivering that content legitimately.
oh yes
at least that was the initial sentiment.
today there's many reasons to go for repacks rather than to deal with steam DRM.
@@holleey As a Linux gamer DRM definitely limits the number of games that will run on my machine.
@@andybullis1140 But to be fair, isn't Steam gaming on Linux a LOT better than it used to be, what with Proton, and Valve actively working with developers to help more games run on Linux? I mean it started when Gabe Newell wanted to have Steam Machines/Steam OS, I mean if 90%+ of Steam games don't work on a platform literally called Steam OS/Steam Machine, it kinda looks bad for you.
@@lmcgregoruk I was confused. It's the third party anti cheats that expect to see the Windows kernel that are the issue, not DRM. Fortunately I don't really play those games anyway.
1) closed source
2) ads
3) included a mining program in bundle
A 23 minutes video that basically says "They put ads."
And then still tries to deflect blame by claiming it failed because of "changing times" or some shit. So, what, 25 years ago we'd be okay with them lying, backstabbing us having ads forced on us and malware and bitcoin miners shoved into our PCs without our knowledge? Or we'll be okay with it in 25 years or something?
Piracy is something that will always be around due to 3rd world nations often times relying off of it just to make ends meet, see Brazil. However, I would imagine that the over-saturation of streaming services combined with more and more classic games either becoming highly scarce or outright becoming abandonware, I foresee that in the coming years many will sail the high seas once again.
yep, even those that are not really considered 3rd world. that's why countries like Ukraine, Russia and other close ones are so *KNOWN* for piracy. basically if you are not from US, UK and few other ones you just have to somehow *deal* with this boom of streaming services and their lack of localized pricing. like, yeah totally people who's country minimal wage is $85/month can afford a $10 services? right??? and that's not even the worst case scenario, because the worst is that some services simply not available (disney+, amazon) and you can't even use vpn to willingly pay for them, because your card s supposed to match the country. actual nightmare. sorry guys, if you don't even want to take my money I will pirate, who's losing here? def not me.
@@iamanti8367 even in these western countries like UK and US more and more people are returning to the high seas
There are a lot of old games that I'm not afraid to admit that I pirate. Simply because of their abandonware status. Which in most cases, the original developers who made that game no longer exists, or just doesn't care anymore. And because these old games are nowhere to be found on a legal store platform (like Steam), and can only be found as used copies sold in flea markets, eBay, Facebook Marketplace etc, the developers and the publishers wouldn't be able to make money off of that game anyways. Since they're no longer manufacturing new copies, or selling those games in game store platforms where you have the ability to purchase it.
So if a game is nowhere available on a legal platform where you can still purchase it, or can only be found as a used copy, I don't see anything wrong about pirating that game. I will though purchase a game legally if the game is still available on Steam, PlayStation/XBOX Stores, or any other game store platform. And if it's a physical copy, from a retailer! And I will buy a used game if it's really cheap, or that I really want it to my gaming collection. I normally don't support piracy, but if it's abandonware, just go nuts and do whatever you want. Even though Nintendo doesn't like when people download their old games, despite their abandonware status.
I never bought a game simply because i Can't even if i want to im from a 3rd world country and a game is half my monthly wage plus we don't even have cards that accept payement so even if we want too we cant , the only solution is options like game pass from xbox
The rebirth of piracy is already happening
Piracy isn't getting smaller, the internet is getting bigger as a whole, making piracy a smaller slice of the pie. Streaming services are dying of their own greed. piracy will always be there. because it's ultimately a service problem. when a service is bad piracy steps in and makes it good. Piracy's main appeal isn't price, it's convevience. Music piracy is on decline because all music streaming services carry all songs. Movie piracy is up because streaming services carry less and less of what you want. Worse service=more pirates
True. Music streaming is easy even with a bit ad here and there. The ad can still be blocked tho. Movie and TV series is in another leve. Hulu Netflix disney+?? I'm done with it. Just pirate it omegalul
Depends what music you listen to. i still donwload my music because the music i listen to is nowhere to be found on legal music streaming platforms.
It's hard to find all the music nowadays though...
@spaceace1288時間_日本語学生 I don't live in America. In some states collecting rainwater is illegal. And you get all of this of my comment? Kinda strange. Strange analogy
@@AndreasElf depends how you search and where you search
what's the background music around the "piracy" chapter of the video?
Remember: piracy is always morally correct
him: *piracy is declining*
me who lives in brazil: this is the biggest lie of the century
lol
Anyone living in a third world country can tell you that it isn't declining at all lmao I hate it here
Exatamente
I'm in a 1st world country and I laugh when people say piracy is declining here
Lmao same in India
Torrents will never die. There's a shitload of gamers/internet users from countries like India, East Europe and South America that just don't have the money to squander on games.
And the current prices are absurd. I live in one and my gaming life's biggest wish was to play HOI4. I had to save up money and wait until a 75% discount AND I've passed my college admission exam.
I had to wait 3 years to buy and play legit HOI4. And I'm probably better off than other countries.
So yeah, pirating isn't going away any time soon
What completely threw me for a loop as an American was seeing how much more expensive technology is abroad. My friend in Chile had to pay TWICE as much for the same thing as I did.
With that said, you guys have every right to pirate what you need. Prices are insane as it is.
Weirdly enough, in India, torrenting has become almost obsolete over the last 5-6 years. Anime fans are the last group of people who I've heard of that regularly use Torrents, tbh.
Internet is cheaper than it ever was, and modern video games are more often than not multiplayer so you can't really pirate them to begin with. And for other games the people who can afford to own good enough PC's or a console can definitely afford to buy games that they have to anyways. Prime, Disney+ and even Netflix are now kinda cheap in India so most people have one or even all 3 of those, and they have a bit of everything from old af Indian movies to the newest Marvel shit, so most people (me included) very rarely go looking for specific movies anymore, if at all. Why bother searching the internet instead of watching what's on one of the streaming services and just waiting for what you want to eventually find its way to one of the streaming services.
I have heard of people using telegram though, as a place to download new movies if you can't wait for the 1-2 months it takes for it to release digitally.
i am one of those guys. I wish with all my heart i could support devs with more than praise but what can i do? I just cant afford it.
when your currency is 4x the price of a dollar a 20$ game becomes an 80$ game. not something worth paying for many people for a simple game
Especially with the bullshit DLC. Paradox deserves every bit of it.
you can always try to reduce or slow down piracy, but you'll never be able to completely get rid off it.
it's just like someone posted an embarrasing video or photo of you. if it's once on the internet, it'll be there forever.
Qbit da best, The hilarious analogy about using photos off the wall in photocopying is far more complicated than just explaining that torrenting is that multiple people have the file and all shared at the same time eliminating individual probelms amongst users
In a weird way I think that piracy has actually become an important and valuable component of the internet world. It is the anchor that keeps corporate greed in check, it keeps the digital free market in check. It has essentially become the "competition" that companies compete against for the consumer's attention. When a product becomes available, companies can decide how they want to market and sell it. If the people feel that what they offer is reasonable, they will willingly part with their money to purchase something 'the legal way'. But always having a free alternative there means that once corporations start getting greedy, charging unreasonable fees and reducing the quality of their products, people will not hesitate to ditch these companies and go back to pirating.
We've already seen this happen. When itunes charged $1 per song, it _sounded_ reasonable, but when you consider that an album probably had 12 songs on it, and the average person might have had 300 albums that they wanted in their library, paying $3600 for music was not feasible, especially for children. Especially when you factor in that many people had already paid for this music once in vinyl, cassette or cd. Because of this people pirated music. Same thing with movies. Movies were too expensive, going to the theatre was no longer enjoyable when people felt like they were getting robbed just to get a drink and a popcorn, plus the ticket itself which cost as much or more than actually buying the dvd. So people pirated movies.
Corporations saw a decline in sales because people would literally rather break the law than pay what these companies were demanding, so they had to change. They couldn't stop people from pirating (they tried), so they had to adapt. This led to the rise of streaming services. People were thrilled to see that they could listen to all the music they wanted for a flat monthly rate roughly equivalent to the cost of one music album. People were happy to ditch piracy for this because the price was reasonable and it was way easier. Likewise with movies, when Netflix started streaming movies people ditched piracy because this was way easier and the price was good. But now there are so many streaming services competing for attention and they are all poaching production studios, signing exclusivity deals, and raising prices. These anti-consumerist business practices are driving customers away and people are turning to piracy again. I guess we'll see how long it takes for the market to break again and force companies to make changes.
Actually, iTunes made a similar magnitude shift in the music industry. Seeing as the only way to get music was buying CDs, producers realized that all they actually needed was 2-3 great songs and the album would sell anyway, meaning they could just pad it out with 9 whatever-songs and 3 hits. As a good example, Adele was a hit singer back in the days of the last CDs I bought, and even though iTunes had been doing the big shift for a while, that album still felt like 3-4 amazing hits and the rest was padding - not bad enough to make me change CDs, not good enough that I can remember them at all. Once iTunes came around and you could buy a single song, you didn't need $10 for 12 songs, you could just pay $3 for the ones you wanted.
Also, iTunes allowed you to import local music to it, that's how I got pirated music into my iphone back in the day, so if you had the album and a CD reader in your PC, you probably could make a backup of the songs in your PC, then send them to the phone. That is actually not pirating AFAIK (but I'm not a lawyer so don't quote me on that), which is why iTunes supported it.
but the rest of your point with movies being expensive and netflix being nice, then all streaming services moving us back to piracy is still sound, I just wanted to share the cool tidbit
@@billionai4871 You are correct, if you purchase the CD you are allowed to rip a backup to your PC and you are allowed to put it on your phone etc.
You don't understand that piracy is part of the marketing strategy of big software corps to gain market share. It's always been like this M$ and Adob€ are the perfect examples, still employing this tactics nowadays
@@billionai4871 you are correct, but then you got into the issue when artists would make multiple albums across several months like this. making 1 good song per cd, so that they could ensure tons of CD sales. when it became common place, many people immediately walked away from itunes for a while after that (thats when the who napster thing was going on). Beginning to pirate and copy their music to their devices. As while you could spend $12 on 12 songs, they would all fit on one cd and you could just rip that... so your getting ripped off.
But by the time the first iphone was around, your talking long past the start of this cycle, iTunes predates the iPhone and iPod, by some degree. Sharing more in common with Winamp at one point then what it became.
Music Piracy predates all of this, as 24bit cd ripping to wav was common before the MP3 format was availible, and people used to share 24bit wav's across several compressed archives that were split, even on message boards during the late BBS era. -- i remember getting 6 5-1/2 720k floppies, with a song on it once from a primary school friend as a joke. thats how rampant it was even still.
"Prices are too high for this product I pirate it"
"Price is okay but why pay when I get for free anyway"
Idk what fairytale you live in
Yup, he hit the nail on the head. It was one thing when Netflix was pretty much the only game in town for $9.99/mo. (currently double that). Now content is spread over a dozen streaming services, all at about the same price. All of a sudden, cord cutting is not be the cheap alternative that it once was, and piracy will be on the rise once again. Do I want to pay for a streaming service to watch ONE show...Star Trek Discovery as an example? Maybe, but not at the current pricing.
That's the worst example i have ever seen in my life
.
Exactly I'm not paying for all this streaming service to watch one or two series that's why I been torrenting for over 15 years idgaf 😂 even back then for psp and PS4 games
noone even mention, like they mispronunce "utorrent" with an "U" ? i/o microTorrent xD
Many people subscribe to one (some two) streaming service, then pirate other contents that are not in the service they're subscribed.
"Morning Brew - for people that are so addicted to social media that they've forgotten RSS exists"
When you have a subscription to a streaming service and you still have to add subscription over it to have access to studio's catalogs. Piracy is not dead at all.
I have always called it Micro-Torrent, because µ is the SI symbol for that. That the original dev didn't go with "micro", for you know, the SMALLEST most light weight client, is completely baffling to me.
Because 'mu' is smaller than 'micro'
@@overloader7900 If you really want to be this precise: The letter is actually called My, pronounced like the German Mü, but the English speaking world has trouble with that. The SI sign µ is actually distinct from the Greek letter µ, and it is used for a variety of scientific things besides denoting "micro". The latter still being its most known application, which is why I made my comment the way I did. But fear not. You were still technically correct, when looking at it in a particular way.
Then why not nano or pico or ..........yocto?
@@roh5876 Because µ isn't used for these?
i just read it u torrent because it looks like a u
I disagree with your conclusion at the end about the demise of piracy due to online streaming. For a brief period, there were decent alternatives, but right now? To get access to the content that sites like TPB offer at a hassle, you'd need to get 4 to 5 streaming subscriptions, each currently going up in price. The reasons for which piracy initially reared its head - lack of access - is returning. I suspect we'll likewise see torrent traffic rise a bit again. But at the same time, as average connection speed goes up, and applications take advantage of that (video teleconferencing for instance), legitimate traffic is going to grow faster then torrents will.
I agree with this point. It's also worth mentioning that now lots of movies are releasing concurrently with their theatrical releases so it's more reasonable to torrent movie than pay a subscription to a service you don't intent to use after that single use-case.
you'll see more poorsaps getting funny viruses if they don't know how to yaaaaaaaaaarrrgggggghhh (pirate) properly
He... does address that point in the video, although briefly.
Definitely - I get 80 Mbit/s and it takes very little time to download a movie in 1080p.
Remember when they said Blu-ray was uncrackable haha
@@andrina118 "Uncrackable" is a joke. Any digital video media has to in the end convert the content back into unencrypted video format, to feed to a display. Capture the signal there in uncompressed, unencrypted form, along with the audio signal, and you can replicate the content. You may get slight loss of quality if you then re-encode it (compression usually incurs a small quality penalty) but I doubt anyone will complain.
That however requires both IT and electronics knowhow.
Torrenting is still the way of downloading game here at Bangladesh . Infact its usage is more than ever now after covid when people started having internet connection at home
Torrents are historical digital archives of the future, that need to be kept alive. In some distant future, the emergence of torrenting would be considered as the
watershed moment in the evolution of internet. Mark my words.
I don't need to mark your words, because I already agree with you!
Facts! I love Flight of Dragons, but I can't find it anywhere, but piracy.
@@rocknrevolt938 Pirating things which are gone from the public store is morally correct!
@Player 1 very true. That is why roms are perfectly moral.
You can only get sims 2 and 1 from pirating nowadays
I always thought it was pronounced 'Micro Torrent' because the µ is an abbreviation for Micro, and one of the original goals of the program was to maintain a small file size.
never heard about U torrent too
*right* as the morning brew ad began I stumble across this and am immediately able to click on your chaptered index & skip it - YOU deserve some kind of humanity award. I’d even shell out a Nobel peace prize for that one… makes more sense than giving to Obama! 😆 hehehehehehehehehehehehehe
It is pronounced micro torrent.
@@PixelatedGypsy I am Obama, and I take offense to your comment
I always called it mu (mew) Torrent because that's what the letter is...
You hit every nail on the head with this video, took me on a nostalgic coaster ride. Well done!
This past Christmas my family wanted to watch Home Alone, but for the first time ever it was not airing on linear TV and not available for streaming where I live. The only option was to rent it for an extra cost through a streaming platform we were already subscribed too... This is the kind of crap that is bringing piracy back, and I'm all for it
I *hate* that shite! I pay a premium for a streaming service only to find the movie I want to watch is another $6. B.S.!!
Which service?
And now with freeve you also have to watch ads every 5 Minutes in many movies although you pay monthly. Man, why cant we have nice things without getting a criminal.
22:29 I find it plausible that streaming services have reduced piracy, but the fact that torrenting is a smaller share of total bandwidth usage nowadays isn't really evidence of that by itself.
The rise of video streaming would reduce torrenting's total share of internet traffic even if people were still torrenting exactly as much, because streaming takes a lot of bandwidth. People are just using way more data overall.
I have a feeling that streaming services are going to cause a spike in piracy again. The fragmentation of all the shows and movies you want to watch into a million different services make the price way too high to justify not just pirating the show or movie for free.
@@potatoonwheels and the, but u have to pay max plan to see 4k... all of that vs, 0$ free 4k download and keep it forever
Yeah but number of people torrenting not having increased by much should mean something.
Personally I feel torrenting consumes much bandwidth than streaming. Streaming means the amount of data is being transmitted over a longer period of time, while typically torrent downloads are much quicker than the total runtime of a movie. Also once you try streaming you probably would have a hard time going back to torrenting having experienced the smooth binge watch experience without waiting for the download (if you find Seeds anyways)
yeah in america they still use bandwidth caps. not in the netherlands or europe in general. i download about 1TB per month easily. no restrictions no nothing. i will never get a streaming service because i can literally find EVERYTHING i want with torrents. and now i have 1Gbps internet connection it download fast enough for me so i dont have to wait anymore. if i download a movie now in 4K with a size of 80GB its often done in less then 15 minutes. dont mind to wait 15 minutes to see a movie for free in 4K.
@@pallav7041 Bandwidth is only a problem in america. not in the rest of the developed world or in most countries really. i download about 1TB per month easily. no problems what so ever.
The wild west was an interesting period of time. In the 90s when all we had in the region was slow 14.4k dial up, parents would burn copies of game+music CD's at work to keep their kids happy. People would borrow albums and CD's and make tape copies. Napster came out, and then all of a sudden it became "OMG PIRACY".
Eventually it was just groups of friends passing around a portable hard drive with dozens/hundreds of movies on them. Rent a movie, rip it, add it to the collection, pass it around. Just an more complex version of having friends over to watch a rented movie.
7:05 as soon as I heard the Bram's name his image of him carrying his baby, which I'm sure everyone here remembers seeing on his site, nostalgia hit me in full force.
I honestly still use µTorrent but that's mostly because I've been out of the piracy game for so long that I just don't know what the newer and more popular programs are.
qbittorrent 👍
Deluge is p decent
qbittorrent has been the gold standard for years.
i use deluge
Deluge is the way to go for me. It's open source, decent UI... In short a piece of software I can honestly recommend and one that I use myself.
Has piracy really declined that much or is it that the amount of internet traffic is infinitely greater than in bittorrents' hay day? Great video
I haven’t noticed a decline personally. I have yet to pay for a single subscription service or movie post early 2000s, yet never have a hard time finding a 1080p - 4K release of any given tv episode or new release. More than anything I’d just wager people would rather pay for 10 streaming services than spend 10 minutes learning how to torrent
Piracy has definitely gone down a lot, especially for songs. I don’t hear anyone pirating songs these days, with spotify and apple music being so affordable and everything. Valve does a really good job fighting against video games piracy too, with it’s frequent steam sales and community and achievements system for games which heavily disincentives pirating games. Gabe Newell really nailed it when he said that piracy is an issue of service, not price. People would willingly pay for better access to their favorite content faster.
@Kund you are in a minority there, the vast majority of people are happy paying subscribing for convinince sake. Piracy won't ever go away completely, hell i generally do a bit of both, with spotify being limited in what it has, and some media just not being accessible on legal streaming services, but as a general rule your average consumer will happily pay a small monthly fee or purchase media digitally from trusted suppliers to mitigate risks of malware, or allow the less technically literate just to click and go. To many the prospect of torrenting may be more convenient than streaming or digital purchasing, but most consumers have very little computer knowledge, so will opt for the more user friendly and newcomer accessible method.
@@danielzboy wait... its weird to just have a shit ton of mp3s downloaded directly to your phone? :(
@@bitchwormpuddin1499 Not at all. I personally hate piracy, but it doesn't bother me if someone else does it, since everyone else has their own reasons for piracy and it's their choice to make, not mine.
I recall calling it micro torrent instead of u torrent
That feeling when you are old enough to remember seeing the downfall in real time with your own eyes...
I have to disagree on one point. Piracy is still as rampant as ever, it's just quieter. Back in the 00s, it was common to hear, "Check out what I got from Limewire last night!!"
But with lawsuits ramping up, especially targeting the individuals, people are getting sneakier and definitely quieter
Fair enough! Honestly I had a lot of fun making this video so I think I will do more videos on the history of online piracy! Perhaps I can investigate this further too and maybe discuss why it's gotten quieter. :)
fk yea i still pirate games and some movies/tv shows that arent on netflix lol
@@yo-bj1lj be careful, this comment could be used as confession if you are caught.
@@aadarshroy3216 oh no the rozzers are outside my house
@@nationsquid oh please do! I love your videos, man! Especially the virus ones
I believe streaming companies are pushing the general audiences back to torrenting, and a major factor could be that some material gets pulled on said streaming network by the IP as it might not adhere to the "modern audiences" and forever can be lost unless the general audience can get their hands on the physical copy of said material.
lol bingo dont charge more then 1 download, 1 7 cent plastic disc..... why things die... greed
If you IP cuts you off for anything then simply get a VP. OPERA gives you a free one - and it works just fine.
not just that, but they might just put the ip on the safe just because they're a bunch of dickheads. Disney does that a lot, not everything Disney has made is available on Disney+, for literally no reason.
Physical copies can get worn out. Retail digital copies can disappear, or have DRM that doesn't work 20 years from now. Only piracy can really preserve media for good.
Yep, it used to be convenient 6-7 years ago when it was netflix that had pretty much all the movies and series, but then it became a hell with 10 different streaming apps each of which is different, requires its own subscription you will easily forget to cancel when you stop watching it, and now they implement things like no account sharing. It's no wonder why people think "why bother subscribing to yet another thing if I want just one series from each of these 5 services, if I can just pirate them more conveniently in one place"
does anybody remember that Opera used to have torrenting built in? also transparent widgets and stuff. then they remade it based on webkit instead of presto and we still dont have anything as good yet...
Hello old friend! I never forgot you!
I used to use uTorrent back then during my high school era around 2012 i think, but some day it asked me to update to version 3 and i hate the new UI, so i reverted back to the previous version and never update it again for years, turns out that decision saved me from crypto mining issue
Cryptomining issue? Could you explain more about that?
@@flyingdutchman3755 don't mind me just commenting to see the explanation if it's posted lol
@@flyingdutchman3755 i think that version of utorrent turns ur computer
Into crypto miner
@@flyingdutchman3755 utorrent uses PCs to mine for crypto
@@brutus3631 bingo - wasn’t the excuse something along the lines of “ohhh it helps us pay for the services so we don’t have to splash ads everywhere” or some bullshit they claimed when word spread? Seems I remember them trying to come up with something that they’d hope people unaware of what mining does to one’s rig would shrug off.
Me: *Sees the title*
Also me as Russian: ha-ha, funny joke. Oh, new repack of Forza Horizon 5 with online-fix? I'll take two!
Yeah, that's not exactly what happened to napster, it wasn't exactly going smooth before it ended, and it all started going downhill with Lars Ulrich serving as the face of the whole "Music industry vs Napster"
several inaccuracies in this video... a few of the most notable:
2001 was not the year of napster. 1999 was.
Leechers are not people who have a piece of media and do not share it. They are people who downloaded it and then do not seed.
Torrenting declined in internet usage because the capacity of the internet massively increased and more of the internet was being used for other things - not because torrenting slowed down. Torrenting actually increased during this time.
Torrenting has not declined in volume, nor is it declining. It has only increased and continues to do so, and is at the highest it has ever been over the last few years.
As much as I dislike gaben, he's right: piracy can go away if you offer better services. The problem is companies have started taking users for granted and in the endless search for a record quarterly report they have gotten, again, to the point where the worth of their service vs value becomes questionable; so yes, I do believe piracy will rise once again. Heck I've been questioning for months if netflix is worth it anymore. It's certainly been in decline for a few years now.
why would you dislike him?
@@selimdogan8070 because unlike the rest of the valve fandom which I stopped being part of, I will not forgive or forget making microtransactions cool with tf2 hats and csgo skins. And that's ignoring his attempts to monetize mods. The more he aged the more greedy and out of touch he became. His interviews and most disliked reddit comment are just a few examples.
that's not true at all... lmao
@Nam Gge And I'm the one misinformed? Lord I hate this reality. There's dozens of interviews of him saying what direction valve is heading towards; employees talking about their old freedom being abandoned in favor of gaben and friends wishes fulfilled. Take off the fanboy glasses and look these things up before commenting.
@Nam Gge Whatever dude, go read his reddit comments and watch his interviews as well as the articles regarding employees. He's probably retired now but since l4d2 until now he led valve on the path they are on today. I'm done arguing with the uninformed.
If you feel morally guilty after torrenting a fine then just seed the file for 10 mins in this way you'll help growing the files seed and helping other people.
bro 10 min is not enough at all....keep it at least a few days or when you are not using the computer
Seeding for 10 minutes does like nothing at all. Either seed for a few days, or until you've seeded as much as you downloaded.
My private tracker needs you to seed for 48h total or seed as much as you downloaded, or you will get a hit and run flag on your account. 3 hit and runs, and you're banned.
@@CIubDuck how??
@@CIubDuck private tracker? What's that?
@@masnidebelicrnac Imagine PirateBay, but if it was locked to users who take torrenting serious. Private torrents and magnet links, if you want to download you have to seed. It's a big private group who downloads and seeds out of the reach of law firms and film-conglomerates.
I still use it and it does the job. If it didn't i would look for something else. Been using it for a decade. Super fast downloads and had no idea there was even a video made of its downfall lol. I'm allergic to streaming so i'd be lost without peer to peer sharing.
In regards to youtube ads? I can handle the my video eas sponsered by so and so short a quick ads performed by that channels cast. I cannot stand the ads in between videos similar to live cable. For that reason i have had YT Premium pretty much since it was called RUclips Red.
I rarely get interested to watch videos that talk about past internet history/software history, but when it's NationSquid that's doing it, I 100% get interested and enjoy all the videos he drops. Great work man! Love your content!
Thank you so much!!! I really appreciate that! I have more content coming your way very soon! :)
@@nationsquid Can't wait!!
cool
anyone member when squid used to make horror mystery vids?
Good for you.
Piracy can be a tough thing to kill off, especially when not all forms of media are available to everyone
haha yar
"Piracy is a service problem" Gabe Newell
piracy is essentially rebelling against greedy fucks ruining neat concepts now that i think about it
Yup, and even when available, it's just not worth it for most. For example my country avarage income is 11 times lower than USA when converted from dollars. And even when a service is available with regional pricing, they do not directly account such a big difference. So a subscription service that would cost $10 in USA, might cost $3 here. So cheap right? But not really. It would be as if someone in USA paying over $30 for that service in comparison. How many would pay over $30 monthly for the basic Netflix option in USA i wonder? Oh, and this is with smaller library size, because you know, not all movies and shows are available in the region even if you do get Netflix.
Yeah i have to torrent wwe content because well they all arent available in sweden
My problem is utorrent ADS work perfectly, but it becomes unresponsive (but still working in the background) and thise rechecks.. ugh
6:40 absolutely no one in those days, especially those on dialup, downloaded a 500+mb file without a download manager..everyone knew better than to have to start over and got a download manager after the first time a download failed due to a lost connection regardless of it's size.
Yeah. 10 MB took 30 minutes with a 56k and cost like a half a dollar. 500 MB would have cost 25 bucks, which was a significant amount back in the day. That is why pre-broadband-era data transfer involved physical movement of CDs, DVDs and even hard drives. No f-ing way you could complete a dial-up download of 25 hours, let alone with the crappy U.S. tech infrastructure. Not to mention you would be holding the phone line for the entire time.
@@ihavenoson3384 yep. Iuckily got broadband super early, like late 96 maybe97
Not only torrenting can save some time and download speeds but it can also preserve many lost files and specially lost games
GabeN is absolutely right, and the dramatic fall of video game piracy is thanks to, in a major way, to Steam. The reason why Steam got so dominatingly successful is its core concept: convenience.
A lot people don't know this, but Steam *didn't* start out as an online game store. It began as a small utility to deliver automatic patches for Valve games (back when they still made actual games). This was so successful, that the service was extended to other third-party games. In the early 2000's, getting patches and updates for your games was a cumbersome process. IF you had internet (big IF) you had to find and download the patches which was easier said than done, or buy overpriced gaming magazines that came with a CD with patches for many popular games at the time, and pray yours was among them. But even when you had the patches, you had to apply them in a certain order or in some other special way or you'd brick your game. Steam cut through this arduous process by offering to download and install patches automatically for all your (applicable) games, saving you all that hassle, which was a *huge* accomplishment at the time.
In short order Steam became a sort of virtual game library, a convenient hub to keep all your favorite games in one place (regardless if it was a Valve game or not), updated and ready to go whenever you wanted to game. Then they started adding even more features, like friend list, chat functionality, server browser for multiplayer games, in-game overlay, patch notes and news about your games, mod support, and so on. (The online store functionality came much later, which is what the platform is generally known for nowadays.)
And this is where the piracy argument comes in. GabeN knew, that the only way to defeat piracy is to offer gamers a better service, better value than what they get from pirates. While pirating theoretically gets you a free game, you pay for it in other ways, mainly security and inconvenience. When pirating games you usually have to wade through lots of seedy websites and services, often chock full of dangerous malware, and even what you download you can never be sure if it's installing just your game or sneakily stuffs your computer full of viruses, spyware, trojans, cryptominers and dreck like that. Also, in most cases cracked games can't be patched/updated, can't use multiplayer or online features, etc, so you often end up with a vastly inferior product.
What Steam offered is not just a game, but security that you indeed get a game and nothing else malicious, immediate automatic patches and updates, plus a whole truckload of added features and convenience, with the one caveat of needing to have a legal copy. Steam grew as a sort of stealth-DRM system, that indeed kept your games up to date and showered you with great features, but your game also wouldn't start if Steam detected any unauthorized changes to the game files and the VAC system would prevent most forms of cheating in online games.
And surprisingly (or unsurprisingly, depending on your stance on the issue) to a lot of ex- and would-be pirates, this was a trade they were more than willing to take, because they were no longer just paying for a game, but for the peace of mind and the plethora of added benefits and convenience Steam offers, which just swung the scales wildly in the legal copy's favor.
And even through all this Steam was and still remains a free program without any third party ads, paid premium features or other obnoxious monetization, focusing instead on making gaming as simple and convenient as possible, with tons of integration and quality-of-life stuff simply no other competing platform offers to this day.
Steam is not successful because it's dominating the market. It's dominating the market because it's successful. Other huge companies tried to create their own version of Steam and failed miserably (Origin, UPlay, RSC, GoG Galaxy, EPIC, etc). No other competing platform ever even came close to measuring up to Steam in features, ease of use and sheer convenience. Granted, Valve has multiple decades of development on them, but that's not the reason competing platforms are usually DOA/non-starters. It's because of the aforementioned core concept: those platforms are all built around monetization from the start, while Steam is built around delivering QoL and convenience first and being a shop floor second.
That was long and I only read the first part and the thing about how it was for updates but that part was interesting
@@HankRichard Thanks. I know it's an infodump, I'm happy you learned something new :)
It also didn't hurt that Steam was effectively a monopoly. Once they killed off physical releases, they were the only game in town until the huge publishers started wanting their own storefronts.
I read it all, I liked your analysis about the matter, makes total sense
Or you can both use Steam and pirate. I like buying indie games properly since they are usually reasonably priced and the money goes to the people actually making the game. But if some big company thinks that I will be downloading their annoying private pop-up add or console, they can guess again.
Still boggles my mind how thy decided to install a crypto miner program on ppls pcs and thought they could get away with it
I just came here to say that after watching only 2-3 videos, you quickly became on of my favorite content creators here in youtube. You make me feel incredible interested for a topic I never felt interested in before. Thank you so much for this amazing content and please never stop!
Thank you so much for your support!! More content to come!! :)
Yep, me 2! Such a good channel. Why does he not have millions apon millions of views!
Count me in too! your content got me hooked.
Me 2 your the best you should have at least 1mil
@@nationsquid Yeah, your content is great, well made and interesting.
It's crazy to think that 2mb used to take ~10 minutes, and 500mb took a day. I wonder how people then would react to speeds now
Man, when i was a kid i used ISP's talktime balance to use internet as data was expensive back then and so slow, I would usually use it download java or symbian mobile games that are just kb in size but took minutes to download. Those were the days but now when is see a kid get frustrated waiting to download a gb sized games in few minutes, man.
i remember back 10 years ago went exactly like that.
I remember pirating manga on dial-up. One volume was around 100MB, so took all night to download. And it was horrible compressed low res jpegs. Price for dial-up was per hour and wasn't cheap either. Then local network company appeared and introduced LAN p2p app. My small town was divided between two companies. Coolest time in using the net. Half a town connected in one LAN. LAN games, LAN file sharing. No social networks. Everyone just shared their photos on p2p app. Some people maintained large collections of movies and everyone downloaded them at LAN speeds. There was sense of community, as opposed to nowadays.
My first internet connection was 512k/s in the early 2000s.
@@LamerCorp for real? i have exactly that amount even to this day xD
Yep, and now that there are a billion streaming services where all the movies and series are scattered I'm dusting off the good ol' pirate hat.
I remember trying to access AOL with a free trial account using a then-already-obsolete 2400 baud modem. It was so slow it was unusable, heh.
Fun fact: In my country we call it Micro Torrent, instead of 'U' Torrent
Micro torrent is the right pronounciation in my opinion because it’s not an u it’s the Greek letter μ which is basically a m and is the physical SI system prefix for micro.
I think people just call it utorrent because it’s shorter or maybe they don’t know what a μ is.
This thank you! ;)
Its Micro Torrent everywhere...
utorrent is just FASTER to say than myu or micro
@@Fitzschmied the greek letter μ is pronounced "Mi", I don't know where people got that "Micro" thing from, sounds fishy.
Adobe becoming subscription base reduces piracy? I thought it is the opposite
it's still pretty easy to pirate new creative cloud software lol...
When I got the money to finally buy it I found out that it's subscription now. So it took another 3 years for me to finally buy subscription. It costs a lot, but I use it quite often for hobbies and university stuff, so it's fine. Their insistence that you pay for whole package, or for nothing, is quite stupid still.
Calling installing literal malware "one bad marketing decision" is quite apologetic.
5:19 What is that supposed to mean?
Need of torrenting is actually rising.
Mostly because every bob and their dog wants to make their own paid media streaming service. It is understandable that different media companies want to make more money but doing that they are alienating their content viewer base.
Most people do not want to pay for 4+ different streaming services. Only one.
They found a solution to the piracy problem, but then these companies' greed caused them to throw it away and push people back to piracy
@@LilacMonarch exactly. Everyone wants a bite and now consumers are forced yet again to take multiple subscriptions because of how fragmented streaming has become. I canceled one of my subscriptions because I literally subbed for a single show. In hindsight it was probably better to just pirate the show than paying "for a whole library" in which 99% of the content I don't even consume.
@@LilacMonarch consumerism and captalism in a nutshell. They take money from consumers all the time
Well if there was only one people would complain about Netflix holding a monopoly
@@NapoleonBonaparde The problem isn't competition, it's the way the service is divided. For example with ISPs there are a few different options with different speeds and reliability, but they all give access to the full internet. For streaming services to work, they need to be able to do something similar
I never considered uTorrent a "cultural icon" like Napster or Limewire, but rather, just the most used torrent client among a long list of choices.
If anything, the Pirate Bay was more the "cultural icon" we associated with torrents than uTorrent.
and Pirate Bay was base on what beershere or maby dhl? PB was a icon of fight/resist of law made by corporations, bt is a technological icon thas survive PB colapse...and we will se how long...
and pirate bay (mirrors) is still up too! best place for really old and rare content
Yes, second that! It was just the most used, but when it was popular there were always plenty of somewhat good alternatives also. Really not any big deal. The only thing that changed with time was people's interest in it, as alternatives in streaming and other just made it less interesting to continue with.
@@Bongwater33and porn. Because as that song said: "the internet is for porn, grab your dick and double click for porn" ♫
This is highly time/region specific. Limewire and Napster are both NA phenomenons, but almost nobody there even knew what DC++ was even before uT really reached its peak.
uT was almost as ubiquitous as freaking winamp in central and eastern Europe.
I got 2 ads in the first couple of minutes of the video, after those 20 or so seconds were over i got a minute long ad from the videomaker. That was a nightmare.
i'm not really sure what do you mean by "fall", as it's still pretty popular.
oh yes, i'm using an older version with no ads included.
that picture analogy wasn't really on spot, would have been better to just explain it with down and upload. other than that, really nice video! thanks for making and sharing
µTorrent might have fallen down but torrenting is still strong as ever
I rarely torrent anymore...and when I do, it is exclusively stuff that you just plain can't get anywhere else...like old software, old versions of software, old archives, ROM goodsets, and unstreamable albums that have never had re-releases (I don't care how much I want an album...I am not paying $600 for an out-of-print CD on the secondary market).
So basically Abadonware?
jokes on you, I get retro PCs from old fucks ...
Not the commodore stuff tho ...
Late 90s to XP era ...
When they wanted $25 for Led Zeppelin 1 I stopped buying new cd's.
The one that I had that was scratched cost $9.99.
ill say, as a decades long dedicated and proud pirate. ive not seen so many other pirates online since those early wild west days, im honestly kinda proud of humanity seeing so many popping up lately.
Fun historical thing. In old days, even blizard used torrenting while downloading huge assets like world of warcraft. Their download program was a torrent from their own multiple server localizations. When downloading wow, you were connected to many many servers and getting little chunks of game archive from different servers.
That's used in nearly every launcher today. P2P Downloads is literally what torrenting is
Konami did it with MGS4 back in the day.
And then you could seed it to other computers on your LAN. BBC iPlayer did this too in its first years.
They still do. When you download something from b.net client you download it both from other people and blizzard servers.
@@GummyGruffi it’s been a few years but I tried it with my housemate at the time, we both had P2P enabled in the settings, one of us DL’d the newest patch, then the other. Had wireshark open, both of our computers only reached out to Blizz servers and not to each other (even though it would’ve been far quicker over the gigabit LAN to simply pull it from mine).
22:58 "And now you can get access to pretty much every movie and tv show you've ever watched" Unless it's blocked in your country, for (monetary) reasons. Or some other streaming service hold the rights, so you now have to fork out 100 dollars a month to 10 different streaming services because they each hold the rights to a bit of the stuff you like.
The second it started with the ads (even though you could fairly disable that 'feature') I switched.
\As for streaming, there are now so many greedy content companies that won't license their stuff to netflix/amazon/etc, piracy is seeing a huge upswing.
Pirating is definitely back on the rise with the way all these companies be actin lately
The reason Naspter was interesting was that you were able to find and very quickly listen so songs you simply can notnormally listen, like the stuff you last heard 10 or 20 years ago. The music you heard for free in the radio in the 80s was available in a heavy laptop. It was the only digital media service. Price or legality was totally irrelevant. Music industry was run by boomers so none of them bothered to provide this service, so people did.
I also used it to find foreign music that you can't find locally. It was great and fast. lol
To spare you 24 minutes. uTorrent added ads and bloat to their software and made the software more unstable and worse to use. People migrated to better freeware.
Thanks
Not to mention installed adware and tried to mine bitcoin on the user's computer
Thanks. Man, this video spent a lot of time padding things out without saying anything.
@@summersmashhit9177 I do like this video format though, it's great for long trips, or long study/play sessions, I love listening to stuff when I do continous tasks
Thanks, this guy did repeat himself a lot and go off topic quit a bit.
Dude, 1GB in 2001? 1GB was a massive file back then.... and 1GB was not overnight... what was about a 3 week plus download.
"It goes all the way back to 2001" at 4:49
Man, this video really didn't need 5 minutes of introduction before starting with the history of the software
As someone who gets movie and gaming media from both legit and pirated services, I don't think it is indeed going away soon. People don't just pirate because they can get something for free but because so much media out there is still so hard to get or are gatekept in regions. And in terms of gaming, there are many like me who would mostly rather pirate for reasons like getting the good game without making certain publishers (who are usually greedy/scummy in context) profit, or trying if a game is even good without regretting to buy it later if it sucked.
*I previously said devs but I had actually had things like EA and _that certain popular and infamous entity I don't wanna mention_ of Take Two on my mind so I was prompted to be corrected by a reply.
I used to pirate games just to see if they would work on my potato pc since a lot of developers stopped making game demos. A couple times I then purchased the game because I wanted to own it (a physical copy.)
@@Gatorade69 I'll admit, I sometimes straight up lifted games cuz I wanted them but couldn't afford them.
Had nothing to do with sampling it.
@@stitchfinger7678 I mean there's definitely games that I pirated that I didn't buy afterwards.
With a lot of games I also wanted to play the multiplayer which wasn't possible with the pirated versions.
Games that I pirated that I later bought : Oblivion (Though I did pirate the stupid DLCs like Horse Armor), Bioshock (bought it twice), STALKER, Mass Effect 2 (though I did pirate all the DLCs).
The Steam sales made it very easy to buy games cheap.
@@stitchfinger7678 same, i just wanted to play the game because it looks fun. But at the same time I don’t have the money to buy the games, so i use utorrent to download pirated games (ik, it’s very embarrassing to say that outloud).
pirating in game otuside of the access is motly because cpmoanies phasedo ut the usage of Demos.
consdiering how much a game can cost today if done by a AAA studio n osane person is gonna chance it and either wont engage at all, or pirate it as their " demo"(knowig full well the game will miss features)
if the latter group publishers should be tryig to reel in by giving thme what they want, a Demo as these people are likely already willing ot pay, just not without trying.
Damn.. Looking back at P2P reminds me of the great Web 1.0 times (before 2004-2006) when things really felt exciting rather than common, mundane or even utilitarian. The early days of Web 2.0 were vastly helped by faster connections and still held some of the excitement but now with Web 3.0 around the corner with AR/VR and other things becoming common place, I do like looking back at the old days and enjoying the fact that my browser history was looked at as rubbish that needed deleted as opposed to info the powers that be need to get into my mind, my soul, observe my patterns or use my CPU power.
Yup when you didn't want to let your internet idle, so you download a cad program that you have no intention of using but at least it's using your bandwidth.
I have the exact same feeling. Finding an interesting website on a topic you liked felt like an adventure to escape to, now it's something I am trying to escape from…
Some linux distrubtions or open-source downloads used torrent as a download option in the past.