• conditional_soup@lemm.ee
    281·
    1 年前

    Tbh, the worst part is when you pay for it and still get ads anyway. Feels like double dipping, but it’s obviously going to happen because wall street doesn’t like when line only goes up a little.

    • dan@lemm.eeEnglish
      105·
      1 年前

      Yeah that’s totally galling. Shrinkflation for online services.

      You know some shiny-suited corporate asshole got a huge bonus for coming up with that though.

    • hemko@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      28·
      1 年前

      Yeah it’s crazy. We have TV plan with some 100 channels bundled up with internet, and sometimes rarely when I watch TV I’m just baffled by the fact a paid service still is full of ads

    • affiliate@lemmy.world
      21·
      1 年前

      the problem is that making the line go up even a little gets exponentially harder with time. because the graph not going up at any given point in time is so unimaginably horrible to them, they keep having to think of new insidious ways of satisfying it

      • spankinspinach@sh.itjust.works
        21·
        1 年前

        I actually find myself wondering lately “what’s so bad about stable (+/- 5%/annum) profits for some stretches of time.” Sure you’re not eating up market share, but a couple million in the pocket every year really isn’t that bad…

        I… May not be cut out for capitalism…

        • FlexibleToast@lemmy.world
          12·
          1 年前

          Only private companies can get away with thinking like that. Companies that can put the stakeholder’s interest ahead of the shareholder.

        • Wolf_359@lemmy.world
          7·
          1 年前

          Companies who stay private can do this. It’s when you have investors that you’re fucked and the ponzi scheme starts.

          The idea, in its purest form, is that companies will innovate to keep investors happy. They will keep expanding and making wonderful new products. As an example, a printer company will start making phones, then laptops, then maybe expand into chemicals or farm equipment, making bold innovations at every step.

          Companies who can’t innovate do this shit (inflate prices until they suck) and then they die because they’re no longer competitive.

          …in theory.

  • clonedhuman@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1427·
    1 年前

    Pirate everything. Pirate streams, torrents, whatever.

    Pirate. Everything.

    *unless it’s an independent artist of some sort. then, just buy some merch from them or something.

  • green_square@yiffit.net
    1134·
    1 年前

    The price of playing skyrim for every minute of my life until I die

    With game pass: Over $9000.00

    Just buying the game: $59.99

      • Gabu@lemmy.world
        22·
        1 年前

        If you bought Skyrim on Steam before 2016, you got all PC versions for free up to now.

        • MeanEYE@lemmy.world
          2·
          1 年前

          If Todd was to be asked about any of this you’d be paying for looking at their promo stuff. Greedy cuck. That’s why they pushed so hard for FO76 to be always online, even though it’s completely pointless.

    • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
      142·
      1 年前

      Gamepass is a great deal if it has 4 or more games a year come out that you want to play, and that’s if you pay full price instead of buying cards, etc.

      • SwiggitySwole@lemm.ee
        171·
        1 年前

        What if I play all my games on a 3 year delay and buy all 4 games for $15 with DLC included?

        • bassomitron@lemmy.worldEnglish
          82·
          1 年前

          I feel like that’s stretching reality unless you’re getting localized pricing for lower income countries. I’ve never seen an AAA game drop below $10 in just 3 years, especially if it’s an AAA game that also got DLC. On average it’s usually just 40-50% off after that kind of duration, mayyyybe 60% off. Anything more than that is usually because the game sucked ass or it’s really old.

      • Encrypt-Keeper@lemmy.world
        81·
        1 年前

        I keep hearing how great Gamepass is but I really fail to see how unless you just began gaming like one year ago. Every once in awhile I look to see what’s on there and it’s just old games I’ve played before.

        • redfellow@sopuli.xyz
          4·
          1 年前

          I really don’t get much use out of reviews and trailers. The only way for me to know if I like a game is to try it. I test tons of Gamepass games and finish half a dozen a year, give or take.

        • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
          3·
          1 年前

          Just in the last month it’s had Sea of Stars, Starfield, Lies of P, and Payday 3 release.

          Lots of others too, of course. But those are the 4 that caught my attention.

        • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
          43·
          1 年前

          Gamepass is great for extended trials, especially indie games with middling to good ratings. Other than that, it’s nice to play the back catalog of MS games if you missed them. At least for PC, that’s what I got out of it.

        • redfellow@sopuli.xyz
          12·
          1 年前

          They decide what they do offer to publishers for game pass rights. If they increase the fee, it’s because they started to pay more for whatever offered to us.

    • Gabu@lemmy.world
      6·
      1 年前

      The price per minute I’ve paid for playing Skyrim + Skyrim SE + Skyrim Anniversary Edition, all DLCs included: Less than 0.01 USD/minute

    • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
      24·
      1 年前

      It’s infuriating.

      I mainly play on PC where thankfully I don’t have to worry about that.

      But I also have a Nintendo switch, and get this shit… they don’t even let you back up your save games online. we’re talking about fucking kilobytes of data per game that they’re too stingy to provide.

      You can’t even back up game saves to the microSD!

      If your switch breaks, is stolen, or you just get a new one, you lose your game saves unless you pay for Nintendo online.

    • redfellow@sopuli.xyz
      611·
      1 年前

      No I don’t. Gold was there pretty much from the get go. Without would be better, but what you asked I don’t recall existing.

        • redfellow@sopuli.xyz
          2·
          1 年前

          Only selected few games had that on PS2. Games were largely SP on top of that. It wasn’t default free, it was a fee except for few exceptions.

          Never owned PS3 so no comment on that.

          BUT, my original question is still applicable. The past you speak of wasn’t common and not something that’s agreed to be the “good old days” so to speak.

          Not saying what you peddle wouldn’t be great, it would, but your statement simply isn’t accurate.

  • patachu@lemmy.world
    894·
    1 年前

    Everyone is saying Piracy but I say Public LIbraries, which often have CDs/DVDs/BDs/games now (depending on your locale). They’re taxpayer funded, so you might as well get your money’s worth, and they keep track of how often stuff gets borrowed which determines future financial support.

    (And if you are tech-savvy enough to be on Lemmy, you probably know how to make a … permanent copy … for yourself to keep)

    • redcalcium@lemmy.institute
      73·
      1 年前

      Libraries are great. Just think about it, if libraries as a concept hasn’t already exist, there is absolutely zero chance it will be invented in our time due to our overly restricting copyright law.

      • Heidur@lemmy.world
        30·
        1 年前

        And also due to a rightward shift in the Overton window. A place where people just get to borrow books for free? That’s socialism. And it will completely kill the entire books industry

      • CosmoNova@feddit.de
        17·
        1 年前

        Which is exactly why big corporations are lobbying hard to get public library stripped of funds by any means necessary. I mean you can even 3D print spare parts in many libraries for free by now! The super rich cannot have that.

    • Polar@lemmy.ca
      1·
      1 年前

      Or save the time and gas money and download it.

      I mean shit, I don’t even have a DVD burner in any of my computers. Haven’t for a decade and a half. You expect me to grab my external drive to burn a copy? I can download anything on my gigabit connection in 5 minutes.

  • Wogi@lemmy.world
    781·
    1 年前

    Brothers, sisters, others, it’s time we return to the old ways. To the high seas. We steal from those who own, but do not pay to own, the content they distribute. We will share this media amongst ourselves until they learn that we were willing to pay with dollars, but not with time.

  • arthurpizza@lemmy.worldEnglish
    682·
    1 年前

    I like to bootleg the major studios and patreon the indie artists that are giving their shit away for free.

    • Ganbat@lemmyonline.comEnglish
      42·
      1 年前

      Where do you stand on indie artists that are using Patreon to act like major studios, e.g. nothing is free and their work is limited release and deleted after the month?

      • Sharkwellington@lemmy.one
        8·
        1 年前

        I find it harder to be upset about what an artist does with their work because they’re the sole creator and didn’t exploit anyone to make it. The limited release stuff doesn’t sound great but none of the artists I follow do that, I certainly wouldn’t support them if they did. If they’re planning to never release the art ever again then I think there’s a fair argument to be made for piracy, although if you’re just waiting for the month to turn over to look at it guilt free, well, I think you’re just trying to justify it to yourself.

        • Ganbat@lemmy.fmhy.net
          8·
          1 年前

          I’ve seen a few that delete their stuff after the month and never release it again. IIRC, at least one of them was making relatively huge cash per month and only ever released cropped previews publicly, so that one was definitely what I’d call predatory, but that is just the most extreme case I’ve seen. I hate that false scarcity works so well.

      • arthurpizza@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        1 年前

        I’ve never seen an indie artist on Patreon that delete shit or used any kind of DRM. At least no artist that I’ve been inspired to support.

        I try to never steal from people, only corporations.

        • Ganbat@lemmyonline.comEnglish
          1·
          1 年前

          I’ve seen a few different methods. Scrubbed Patreon profiles, archives with passwords that change every month and aren’t redistributed, etc. I’ve run into several artists who do this.

  • iforgotmyinstance@lemmy.worldEnglish
    62·
    1 年前

    I don’t have Peacock but I’m hanging out at my parents house and apparently when you pay for Peacock you have to watch ads at the beginning and end of shows PLUS every time you pause.

    Every single time they paused it transitioned to an ad. What psychopaths run NBC?

    • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
      30·
      1 年前

      Concur. I pay for the following subscription services:

      • My internet connection.
      • My cell phone plan.

      That’s all. Everyone else can go fuck themselves. If I can’t buy it outright, I don’t need it. If it’s digital, it’s on the Pirate Bay. Prime is bullshit anyway. I don’t need a predatory gym membership; Putting an elliptical machine in my own house cost me all of $200 and it’s mine forever. I don’t pay for Dropbox or OneDrive or whatever; I have a massive hard drive in my PC and I can access remotely it via my VPN. Etc.

    • sexy_peach@feddit.deEnglish
      181·
      1 年前

      Same. I would never pay them for their shitty little services. Imagine paying monthly for dropbox, sporify etc for years… That’s so much money.

      • Squizzy@lemmy.world
        301·
        1 年前

        Eh Spotify gets a whole family unlimited for 17 euro, it’s pretty convenient compared to going finding and uploading to my device or purchasing individually.

  • Polar@lemmy.ca
    547·
    1 年前

    I don’t hate subscription based services if they’re priced fairly and make sense.

    Paying monthly for a service that then starts giving you less, adds more premium plans, introduces ads, etc. is garbage.

    Paying for a game, then having to pay a monthly fee to play (WoW, for example), is garbage.

    Paying for software, but then having to pay monthly to use the software, is garbage.

    Paying for software, but then having to pay monthly to be allowed to contact support (Blue Iris), is garbage.

    But paying for things like Spotify, where you get access to pretty much all songs as they release, have no limit on how much you listen to, and it has a fair student pricing or family pricing, that’s fine. Way better than paying per song.

    I mean shit, if I paid for every song I have in my library on Spotify, I’d owe $1430. My Spotify is $17 per month, spit between 4 people, so I pay $4.25. I can either pay for every song in my library and not add any more, or pay for Spotify for 28 years and continue growing my library…

    • Aurix@lemmy.world
      7·
      1 年前

      WoW and other MMOs are not just games with slapped on subscription costs. It is a very specific subtype of games which have much higher maintenance cost than an arena shooter. There is a reason these games get shutdown when certain financial thresholds get passed beyond let’s do something more profitable.

    • leviathan3k@sh.itjust.works
      6·
      1 年前

      Honestly, this.

      The economics of the world are such that people need to be paid for the content they produce. Having a direct relationship between me as the consumer and them as the producer is the way we don’t get shit like all of the ad-based spyware that surrounds shit like Facebook. It won’t completely prevent it, but it gives a good business plan for it not to happen.

      I’d vastly prefer something that didn’t require some megacorp as evil as Amazon. But… this could actually make as much sense as is possible with our current economic system.

    • Zhao@lemm.ee
      6·
      1 年前

      Spotify is the only subscription I still pay for. That’s it. Everything else is whack

    • dangblingus@lemmy.world
      52·
      1 年前

      Nah, fuck subscriptions. If I can’t buy it once and own it, then it’s a scam on consumers. Change my view.

      • Polar@lemmy.ca
        81·
        1 年前

        I did. Look at my Spotify example. It’s literally more expensive to own the songs than to pay for Spotify.

        Unless you only want like 30 songs.

          • Polar@lemmy.ca
            21·
            1 年前

            Still cheaper, though.

            I’d rather have access to pretty much every song on demand for $4 per month and not own it, than pay per song.

            I pay $4.25 per month for Spotify. That’s $51 per year. I have access to pretty much every song, or I could buy 39 songs to own instead.

            I save more than 39 songs per month. Financially it makes no sense to buy them. Especially if you consider I get bored of some songs, and never listen to them again.

            • ShadowCatEXE@lemmy.world
              3·
              1 年前

              The way I look at it, is I don’t pay to listen to the music, I pay for the convenience.

              Most music I listen to is on YouTube, where if I wanted to, I could just download it and “own” the song for free. However, in the interest of saving time, letting Spotify create playlists based on what I listen to, I just pay a monthly fee. Not to mention that I can share my playlists on multiple devices, whereas if I download music, I can’t.

              I also have a family plan with all spots filled up, so that’s 6 people listening to all their music for $20/mo CAD. Far superior to buying an album or individual songs.

  • phario@lemmy.ca
    42·
    1 年前

    There was a prophetic podcast episode from the series Plain English a while back that I constantly think about.

    In that episode the author describes how the internet is going through a revolution.

    Basically 20 years ago, the internet was all about gaining numbers. Companies could operate at a loss if they got people signed up. Facebook, Google, YouTube, Uber, Deliveroo, etc. they were all about getting you in their mailing list or consumer list and who cares what happens then.

    Now there’s an issue because that model is not profitable. In order to continue, all the internet is moving towards subscription.

    In a sense, I don’t think of that as intrinsically bad. Patreon is a good example. The internet is now filled up with so much shit that people are willing to pay to filter it. So with Patreon, you pay a fee to support an artist to produce the content you want. That itself isn’t a bad idea.

    Now that being said, a lot of “bad things” do emerge. The fact that you can no longer buy software like Adobe and it’s all subscription based. That’s shit. But that also inspired software alternatives like Affinity Designer.

    • mommykink@lemmy.world
      17·
      1 年前

      The fact that you can no longer buy software like Adobe and it’s all subscription based

      100% the biggest factor in me deciding to buy Magix Vegas (formerly Sony Vegas) video editing software was because they still sold lifetime codes. Have I gotten $400 worth of value out of it? Fuck no. But I can use it whenever I want for as long as I want without worrying about whether or not I can afford it for the month.

  • the_seven_sins@feddit.deEnglish
    391·
    1 年前

    It’s not that I don’t want to pay for the service, it’s just that I hate the automatic recurring withdrawals, even if I can cancel monthly.

    I would probably use more subscriptions if I could just pay like three month of access in advance - basically like these gift cards work.

    • CrowAirbrush@lemm.ee
      4·
      1 年前

      It’s not that i don’t want to pay, it’s just that their “service” isn’t serving me and thus not worth the money.

      Give me my cd’s back lol. Let me own what i purchase.

      • DJDarren@thelemmy.clubEnglish
        1·
        1 年前

        I use an iPod that I’ve modded 128gb into. It’s great. All the convenience of my own high quality music library, without having hundreds of CDs around.

        • CrowAirbrush@lemm.ee
          2·
          1 年前

          My phone is 512gb and i use about 80 myself, largest part is porn(yeah i’m aware, it’s bad…very bad,i need some time).

          I’ve decided to start pirating again as my device has plenty of space to keep my music.

          The biggest thing is getting all lf the music, so nowadays i’ll just play what i have and sometimes go: “oh damn i forgot about billie eilish” for example and make a mental note until the next time i’m at my computer with some time to spare.

          Slowly but steadily decreasing my porn stock and replacing it with music i would’ve bought as cd’s.

      • camr_on@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 年前

        Not all of them. Spotify doesn’t, they know that people will just pay monthly, they don’t have any reason to offer a discount

  • Transcriptionist@lemmy.world
    414·
    1 年前

    Image Transcription:

    A crazy trollface stick figure hides behind a crudely drawn square, holding a shotgun and saying “I HATE SUBSCRIPTION BASED SERVICES I HATE SUBSCRIPTION BASED SERVICES I HATE SUBSCRIPTION BASED SERVICES” as an army of harp darps wearing blue helmets with various logos on them come through a crudely drawn door.

    Around the harp darps are various statements they are making as they move into the room. At the front left, below a harp darp wearing the Adobe logo, is the text “You can afford it, come on”. To the right of the Adobe harp darp is one wearing the Dropbox logo. Behind the Adobe harp darps is one wearing the Netflix logo, and behind the Dropbox harp darp is one wearing the Spotify logo. Between the front four harp darps is the text “Just $15 bro”. To the upper right of the Spotify harp darp is the text “Limited Ads dude”. Behind the Spotify harp darp is one wearing a Twitter (now X) Verified blue tick, with the text above its head reading “It’s less than a cup of coffee bro…come on”. To the right of the Twitter Verified harp darp is one with the Nintendo Switch Online logo. To the upper right of the Nintendo Switch Online harp darp is the text “It’s just a small monthly payment dude”, and to the bottom right of the same harp darp is the text “You use it all the time Anyway bro”. Behind and to the left of the Twitter Verified harp darp is one wearing an Amazon Prime logo, standing outside the door.

    [I am a human, if I’ve made a mistake please let me know. Please consider providing alt-text for ease of use. Thank you. 💜 We have a community! If you wish for us to transcribe something, want to help improve ease of use here on Lemmy, or just want to hang out with us, join us at !lemmy_scribes@lemmy.world!]