I'm very out of the loop at this stage of life, but one thing I have wondered--has software as a service, and all the online gaming, killed off all those kinds of warez? Are most of these pirate sites nowadays just for movies/tv? (One of the reasons I have been wondering about this is that I so f'ing hate windows etc updating and phoning home all the time I would prefer a version cracked a la 2007 to prevent that, over the legit copy I own.)
I genuinely think Spotify and Netflix, and other streaming services, have been the biggest blow to torrent sites. For the average user, it's just so much easier to pay $10/month (or even less when you share your account with friends) and get easy & user-friendly access to the content (in a way that happens to be legal).
10-15 years ago, before Spotify/Netflix, people used to say: "As long as it's easier to acquire things illegally, people will continue doing so," and I think that has really been shown to be true.
There is still no worldwide availability of all streaming services which keeps piracy for media going. For example I have no way to legally access to Disney+, paramount, hulu or peacock content. I'm happy to pay but can't.
Online-only, heavily DRMed games are still a tiny minority of games.
And even if you look at popularity instead, Minecraft (so far as the more open Java version is still popular at least) single-handedly skews the results enough for them not being a clear win for the locked down games.
what metric are you using if not popularity? the raw # of games put out on the market?
I can remember the online game thing starting way back when I was still playing. Quake had an ethernet option, and I remember something called "Unreal Tournament" spreading like wildfire around dorms when I was in school. My first though was "it's really fun shooting at real kids instead of barrels!" immediately followed by "this is going to be really hard to crack!" I figured every developer would move online by now just to kill cracking.
