At first this article reads like your typical anti-piracy screed. It rants about how 10x more people watched GoT illegally (confusing them with lost sales) and ends with how downloading movies can get your credit card stolen.
The middle of the article however, destroys the author’s case.
Time Warner (owning company of HBO) CEO Alan Bewkes stated in 2013 how becoming the most illegally streamed show in history was “better than an Emmy” and that torrenting ultimately led to more paid subscriptions.
“We’ve been dealing with this for 20, 30 years—people sharing subs, running wires down the backs of apartment buildings. Our experience is that it leads to more paying subs. I think you’re right that Game of Thrones is the most pirated show in the world and that’s better than an Emmy.”
The CEO of Time Warner, who knows more about the finances of his own show than ForeverGeek writer Tom Llewellyn, championed piracy and said that it brought them more subscribers rather than nearly destroying the show as the article claims.
Needless to say, Tom forwent a rebuttal in favor of writing how you can get malware from downloading it…
Anti-Piracy Propaganda: 0 Truth: 1
Good thing they were fast enough to destroy it with the shittiest last season ever.
See, I think that was the plan all along, to totally own all the losers that pirated GoT, by totally spoiling the show for everyone.
Let’s be real. HBO wanted to hold on to their cash cow for as long as possible, but D&D just shat all over the last season to get that sweet Star Wars cash.
Nobody was on-board with anything in that last season except D&D, who just wanted to finish it off as fast as possible. Not even the actors.
The hilarious thing is how their own bungling of the last season cost them the Star Wars gig. Maybe if they’d actually put in some effort instead of half assing it, they’d have gotten the job. But then again, the show was on a downward spiral since the end of Season 4, and Dumb and Dumber’s only talent was adapting the books really well (and even then, they still fudged details), so I suppose this was bound to happen.
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Didn’t the actor who played Tyrion Lannister stand by the ending? I remember him being salty about criticisms of it. Though to be fair it must really suck to have your breakthrough role go up in flames like that. I wouldn’t want to admit it either. Now I can’t even remember the dude’s name. He was supposed to be a beacon of hope for dwarf actors who wanted serious roles, and the role became a joke.
Here’s why I dno’t understand, if D&D wanted to dick away so badly, why didn’t the crew just, like, let them go, and bring in another director that was instead respectable and wouldn’t torch the franchise and run?
Heck, it can’t be that hard to come up with people who want to direct GOT. Heck, I would have done it.
GoT never captured me past the first few episodes. What was bad about the ending?
That they yhrew away all the rules they established before like traveling now took 0 hours and soon. All of this because the last book wasn’t written yet so they had to write some story themselves and failed misserably.
HBO told the show runners(D&D) they could take as long as they wanted to finish the series. D&D had just landed jobs at the helm of a new Star Wars trilogy so they were eager to wrap up Thrones and start raking in that Disney cash. They made the last season shorter than other seasons, it sucked and they ended up losing the Star Wars deal.
I remember people knew the ending due to leaks about a year ahead of time and claimed it was all BS since it was so ridiculous. We were all wrong
A surprising amount went wrong.
While there are a sea of complaints, the biggest for me was that all of the characters stopped having internal logic. Take Jamie, he had a character arc moving from a vain knight avoiding responsibility and having an incestuous relationship with his sister, to having depth, showing that he was wracked with guilt for breaking his oath to help people. Falling in love with a woman for her character and who she was. Being responsible and honorable again. Then the last season came around and he dropped all of his growth to be with his sister.
It’s like D&D decided that there would be a cool scene of him dieing with Cersi and didn’t care how he got there.
The show reached a point where they’d surpassed where the books were in the narrative and things fell apart. The political intrigue, backstabbing, and subversive nature of the story was done away with in favour of forcing plot points through to get everything wrapped up, with no consideration made on why those characters would act in the way they did.
You could build a museum of horrible decisions and fill it with the last two seasons of Game of Thrones. Whether you watched it or not, the show was a cultural touchstone, and the ending retroactively ruined everything that came before. Many shows have started well and ended poorly, but I’d argue that GoT was on pace to be an all-time top ten series, and there was absolutely nothing good to say about how it ended. Bad writing, bad acting, bad production values, sloppy editing, poor visual design, it was both rushed and too slow, and nothing made sense. If you paid someone to deliberately fuck up everything about the show, they would not have been as effective at it because it would have been obvious.
Compare it to this… Watching a highly rated chef come up with the most amazing sounding and looking dinner meal over the course of a few hours. You are anxiously awaiting to take a bite and salivating for that moment. When you finally get served your plate and get to that scrumptious first bite, the biggest wave of disappointment hits and you lose your appetite.
I don’t know how else to explain it
The best way to summarize it is the writing lol. And they tried to rush plot points way too fast.
The first seasons had the books with everything spelled out.
The end wasn’t (still isn’t) written. So the show runners were told who gets the iron throne at the end, but not how/why. Also a few other ending points.
So in the show, there’s no good reason for what happens at the end. D&D just had shit happen rather than try and show why people would do that shit
Tldr; the whole 6 first season they set up the table for some really juicy stuff and in the last season, some side quests were either ignored or fast-tracked to fit in 1/3 of an episode. Realistically, you had content for at least 3+ more seasons. But since GRR Martin is so slow to write his books (I don’t blame him, just pointing out the obvious), the producers of the show had to cut corner and take huge liberties that didn’t make any sense
Zero sympathy. If they wanted to reduce the amount of illegal streamers, all they’ve got to do is make their content more accessible.
Release it on multiple streaming platforms, not just their own. Ensure its released globally at the same time. And get rid of the geo-blocking.
The lack of reasonable legal alternatives is what drives piracy.
As evidenced by the brief moment in history when Netflix was all that and it drove video piracy all but to extinction.
This is the case still with Spotify, apple music, deezer, etc… Multiple services with few if any exclusives means almost all music piracy has stopped. Somehow, the record companies continue to survive.
I think we’re going to start to see music services going that way soon, for the first time I’ve started to see that songs in my primary play list are now not available in my region.
I admit I dont know what songs yet, am on a road trip at the moment, but it makes me worry that it’s going to get worse.
That´s so insane, right? I mean, they practically had us in the bag with netflix. People either had their own account or chipped in to use someone elses one BUT EITHER WAY, THEY PAID FOR IT! And then came one of the rare moments where more competition was actually bad.
I think with digital content platforms in general, competition means more headaches for customers.
The store front/streaming service is not what people sign up for, but the access to a certain movie, show or game. If the catalog of all available pieces of content gets scattered across multiple services you now have to use multiple apps, pay multiple subscription fees and search through multiple catalogs.
I’d say from a customer’s perspective, increased competition lead to a worse situation.
It’s not the competition that’s bad! It’s the anti competitive laws that allowed it to spoil. Companies saw how profitable Netflix was and pulled their shows from the platform to artificially create a reason for consumers to use their own shitty services. Netflix was no longer able to purchase those titles.
I would need even more. Let me buy it digitally. Not streamed, not with some draconian DRM. Just let me buy the MKV files straight from HBO, and I won’t pirate them.
They have to be aware of how easy it is to rip a blu-ray, yet those are still for sale. So let’s just skip the middleman and give me legal remuxes.
Tbf Blu Ray is a good distribution media. It’s the DRM that’s ruining it.
The DRM pipedream has been going on for so long in the industry that it’s basically dogma at this point. Everybody knows it doesn’t work but they’re in too deep to question it.
Oh dear, don’t get me started on that. I had to buy expensive software to play back the few Blu-Rays i have. CyberDVD doesn’t even allow you to skip intro videos and anti-piracy crap. You know, the crap we didn’t do when we bought the medium or ignore anyway if we create our own backups or share the media illegally.
Also i hate region-locking. I bought the complete Daria DVD collection which lacks the original soundtrack btw. And i am not permitted to watch it because what? International copyright? Technological differences we overcame long ago?
I can switch the region of my blu-ray drive in my PC 5 times. After that it will stay in the last configured region. A very, VERY arbitrary limitation!
I mean… you can just pirate/download it, it takes literally 10 seconds once you know how… and to know how takes like 2 minutes lol
I remember here in the Netherlands that you could only watch HBO through a specific internet provider (ziggo-Vodafone). I’d have to switch goddamn ISP’s to pay for their show. That gave me all the justification to pirate the shit out of it.
I can’t fathom why these media companies still love to do exclusivity agreements. There’s no way it’s more profitable than just allowing everyone to watch your show from any service, with commissions for the number of views.
I’d probably start paying for a streaming service again if I could watch every show in one place. But I’m not interested in playing musical subscriptions.
Ensure its released globally at the same time
This was easily the biggest driver. For GOT, I had legal access but I was expected to wait over a month, by which time because the internet - the spoilers would have been completely unavoidable.
Reminds me of Shrek 2. Which premiered 6 months after the US in my country.
I wanted so badly to watch it in cinema, but internet talked about it, friends talked about it, and I had people coming over with burned copies wanting to share it with me…
Yeah, I did not see it in cinema. For some reason it didn’t do well here.
And someone who knows better please correct me if I’m wrong, but 10 years ago for streaming is an eternity ago.
I believe back when the show was new and hot you could only watch HBO WITH a cable subscription
There’s a reason people pirated it instead of just subscribing
Ok, I was right: this late 2014 article says they’d finally offer standalone “next year”
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/time-warner-hbo-stand-alone-subscription-netflix,27892.html
Edit: April 2015 is when it started. So quite a bit after GoT started
Yep, which is why many people had this exact experience: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones
Instead it was destroyed by two greedy fucks rushing the ending two seasons early so they could move on to their next cash grab flop!
It was supposed to be Star Wars but they messed up GoT so badly they lost the Star Wars bid.
I believe they’re doing 3 Body Problem next, another adaptation but for a Chinese sci-fi this time
Game of Thrones was destroyed by the writers lol
I mean, theres more than a few reasons Martin hasn’t finished the books. A major one being that the style of writing doesn’t benefit from ending, its mostly a constant series of escalations without ever resolving anything. At a certain point no resolution will ever be satisfying.
Not saying the show ending couldn’t have been better, but like shows like Lost or Heroes, or all those shows like that, no ending could ever live up to the hype generated during its run.
Incredibly relevant: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones
It’s been said a million times, but piracy is an accessibility issue. Chasing your favorite shows across streaming platforms is exhausting.
I’ve always lived by lord GabeN’s “piracy is a service issue. You have to offer a better experience than the pirates”
Can we say Gabe’s practice can translate to movies\shows? His products are at least 10hr worth (thus worth subscribing and enjoying an occasional sale), can be further promoted by having multiplayer, cloud saves, achievements…
It’s true this old blood can’t understand pirated MKVs are better than streaming-only DRMed shit. But is there anything they can really do to make their services work?
I think that it’s not a problem of a service itself if it’s not too shitty, but promotional campaign with memes like the one of Squid Games. One can be a Hitler of streaming platforms, but if this show is the new Lost, you’d make a bank anyway.
is there anything they can really do to make their services work?
Once upon a time we had netflix. Almost everything you could want to watch was on there because they were just about the only show in town. During that time there was precious little reason to download most shows.
Now in order to have access to the thing you want to watch, you’re expected to pay for 5 or 6 separate streaming services, by which point you end up at the same insane price point as paying for the full package of cable/PayTV channels.
They had a good thing and they ruined it with greed, just like everything else under capitalism. Glorious state streaming network should be only show in town, comrade.
I was super into piracy when I was ~12, but as Netflix took over and you could get everything you want with 2-3 subscriptions totalling <$20 per month I eventually stopped because it was easier, a much better experience, and worth the money. Now that there are too many services to count guess who has an RPi BitTorrent/Plex server? I’d prefer to go back to the old Netflix way of things as it’s so much easier, but there isn’t any option more convenient than my current setup.
If I could pay $50 a month and get everything I want content-wise I would, but I cannot. Not counting that half the subscription services are awful to use, or are missing major portions of series,. I’ve even started pirating content I pay for access to because I don’t have to deal with DRM bullshit.
With Steam though I’ll pirate a game, and if I like it I’ll go buy it because it’s a better experience. Gaben is 100% correct that you have to provide a better experience than pirates, otherwise why would anyone pay for a worse experience?
Sure, they just have to start thinking outside the box they built around themselves for once.
Here’s an easy one: watch parties. You and your friends can watch the show together far away. You have integrated voice and video chat maybe, and pausing pauses for everyone.
Free shows or free teasers for shows. Not paying for a sub? You can watch the first 2 episodes of Brooklyn 99 for free, and avatar the last Airbender is free to watch or whatever.
That’s not even scratching the surface. Netflix spent so much time building features that nobody uses (trivia and Minecraft story mode have almost good software behind them, why can’t you do it easily with friends?), They could do something good but won’t because God forbid they lose out on short term profit.
