• Humble Bundle does that. Their subscription comes with a collection of DRM free games you can just download and keep forever even if you cancel it.

  • Iron Lynx
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    118 months ago

    I like to apply some business logic to it.

    • I expect to use the product or functionality provided by x on a regular basis
    • The use of x has no added utility
    • The functionality and/or feature set (e.g. content) of x may degrade significantly without warning and/or recourse
    • Unavailability of x is likely to render it completely useless

    If most of these conditions can be regularly sufficiently true, then searching an alternative that incorporates proper ownership is a good course of action.

  • Blass Rose
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    188 months ago

    I love the two sides of “It’s about the price of a cup of coffee” like they’re not referring to a 30oz premium milkshake with a shot of espresso, not a regular black coffee.

    Then the

    “Your generation can’t afford anything because of your coffee addiction!”

    Like companies aren’t just monetizing every single last thing and telling us “you’ll own nothing and you’ll LIKE IT!”

  • HexesofVexes
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    128 months ago

    I honestly just don’t use these services, and never recommend them, entirely because they are subscription-based.

    As a model, it is largely focused on trapping the user who forgets to cancel. Many also use sneaky ways to avoid a user cancelling in time, and give no warnings.

  • MrSilkworm
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    8 months ago

    As everyone else here, I think piracy is illegal and immoral. We should accept that we don’t own our services and software and we should never doubt that corporations have our best interest in mind.

    Therefore you should never have a Plex server, never use protonmail, never use AdGuard Home, never use AdGuard DNS for private DNS.

    Also you should never use Firefox with UBlock origin sponsorblock and consent o magic.

    Lastly you should never ever use re-vanced and x-manager, and God forbid don’t use a VPN

    Edit: syntax

    • Ann Archy
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      68 months ago

      Oh they expanded that? I remember when it was just “You will own nothing”.

      • qaz
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        8 months ago

        The saying comes from an opinion piece that was sponsored by the WEF. You can read more about it on the Wikipedia page. The article presented a future where the climate problem was fixed because the entire economy was based on services instead of the production of goods. It certainly has some elements that could work, but also has relied heavily on the neoliberal “the market will fix it” mentality.

    • @sbv@sh.itjust.works
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      48 months ago

      Are streaming services that different from cable TV? You’re paying for access to new content. If you want specific content to own, don’t they all let you buy them? I know I was able to buy GoT discs when I wasn’t willing to pay for an HBO subscription. Has that changed?

      • @echo64@lemmy.world
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        68 months ago

        yup, the very popular stuff you can usually (but not always) buy on disk. the less popular stuff you can sometimes (but not often) buy on disk if the creator really pushes for it

      • JJROKCZ
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        38 months ago

        Difference is that most games made anymore are online access dependent even if they aren’t dedicated multiplayer only games. What happens when subscriptions get so low that upkeep is unprofitable? You lose access to a game that you’ve paid a lot of money for, for no good reason as online isn’t necessary but the studios rarely patch it out at game sunset

      • JJROKCZ
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        148 months ago

        Ubisoft should get comfortable with the idea of going out of business. I refuse to buy anything of theirs or interact with their shit launcher. Bad practices and bad products combined mean bankruptcy and i hope it happens soon so decent companies can get ahold of their IPs and make some good games out of them because Ubisoft is clearly not interested in doing so

      • IWantToFuckSpez
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        8 months ago

        Ubisoft should get more comfortable with losing any significance they had in the industry. Compared to others in the rest of the industry they are small potatoes. They definitely don’t hold enough power to force a subscription service on to the market. Their market cap is less then $3 billion even Zynga is worth more.

      • @leave_it_blank@lemmy.world
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        58 months ago

        So you only buy a license? Like on Steam, Epic, and all the others? Shocking.

        I think modern gamers are comfortable with this, they just haven’t realised it yet.

        Or they buy on gog. Then they really have ownership.

        • deweydecibel
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          8 months ago

          People keep pointing this out like it’s some kind of misinformation.

          The Ubisoft executive is saying gamers need to get comfortable not owning their games before subscription services will take off.

          The Ubisoft executive would also very much like subscription services to take off.

          QED the Ubisoft executive is saying “I’d really like gamers to get used to idea of not owning their games so our subscription service can take off”.

          It comes back to the same thing: Ubisoft is saying aloud what they want the future of gaming to be.

          And please don’t tell me you’re giving them the benefit of the doubt, here.

          The problem is people apparently haven’t figured out yet how to read what the CEO of a for-profit company means when they say shit publicly about their services. Learn to read between the lines.

          • @FishFace@lemmy.world
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            18 months ago

            There’s a mile of difference between saying “consumers need to get comfortable not owning their games” and “we want consumers to get comfortable not owning their games (but using subscription services instead)”.

            The former statement is extremely arrogant. The latter is just obvious. And it’s reasonable even if you or I personally don’t want to get our games on a subscription model - millions of people get their music through Spotify and it suits them just fine even though other people don’t want that. So it’s a way of straw-manning the people pushing subscriptions so you can hate them.

          • @Sanctus@lemmy.world
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            128 months ago

            It doesn’t make a difference. He still wants you to get comfortable with that. It doesn’t matter how he dresses up his sentences his thought process is the same, thats how he got to CEO.

            • @FishFace@lemmy.world
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              58 months ago

              The point of the dishonest article is to make you believe the CEO feels entitled to gamers becoming OK with subscription models. What he actually feels is a hope that subscription models will take off. It’s rage-bait. Did it work?

              • @grue@lemmy.world
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                88 months ago

                …you believe the CEO feels entitled to gamers becoming OK with subscription models. What he actually feels is a hope that subscription models will take off

                That sounds like a distinction without a difference to me.

            • WillBalls
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              128 months ago

              But he’s not CEO. He’s the director of subscriptions at ubi, so of course he’s going to push this line of thinking; his job depends on it!

              The good news is that Ubisoft’s stock fell ~10% once this soundbite took off, so hopefully other publishers read the room

        • @FierroGamer@sh.itjust.works
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          28 months ago

          Thanks, I just linked the first article I found assuming it would be enough to get the point across, did it say something incorrect?

  • @IHateFacelessPorn@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Netflix and Spotify actually makes sense to be subscription based. Amazon depends on how often you do shopping through them since it’s actually free (if you don’t include the fees) to function. I definitely wouldn’t pay for Dropbox but cloud storage and sync pretty much has to be a monthly subscription. If you are going to be against something at least be against to the parts that makes sense to be against of.

    • @CrowAirbrush@lemmy.world
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      38 months ago

      Life worked perfectly fine before Netflix and Spotify, everything was also fine before cloud everything.

      They can suck on my left nut.

      • @cerulean_blue@lemmy.ml
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        38 months ago

        Yes, and life still works fine without them…nobody is forcing you to subscribe to Netflix. Keep paying your monthly cable subscription like the old days.

        • @CrowAirbrush@lemmy.world
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          18 months ago

          I ain’t got no cable, last time we had cable i watched for 2 weeks and after that everything was just repeating what i had already seen in those 2 weeks and loads of nonsense shows.

          I prefer doing things, like learning new skills or doing something active.

    • @marx2k@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Especially considering most Twitter bluechecks today are bot accounts doing chatgpt responses

  • @GBU_28@lemm.ee
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    58 months ago

    Fuck Amazon but it is not like the others in the meme

    Amazon lets you acquire physical items, of insane variety, delivered to your door, often for a price lower than you can find it in physical stores. Often delivered same day and almost certainly same week.

    That’s an insane value compared to something like a game company that’s like “teehee you can pretend to own this until we get bored of hosting it and then poof fuck you!”

    • @ScreaminOctopus@sh.itjust.works
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      8 months ago

      Amazon is probably the worst of all of these. The only reason prime exists is to lock you into their store for all your purchases, when shipping orders should be a discrete charge for each shipment. At least the rest of these (except for Adobe and Nintendo, who suck about as hard) give you access to their infrastructure that lets you access the entirety of the product they offer instantly, whenever you have an internet connection.

      • @GBU_28@lemm.ee
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        8 months ago

        No. You get to buy a shovel with faster delivery. You get the shovel, forever. Nintendo let’s you “buy” a game they could sunset at any moment. You possess nothing.

    • @turmacar@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      I did the math for me and even with the Amazon credit card the service wasn’t worth the price. It’s free shipping over ~$25(?) dollars anyway. “Prime shipping” hasn’t meant anything significant since at least 2020. It’s often the same as non-prime, maybe a day earlier.

      If you care about the shows that maybe changes, but they have about 5 and anytime you search for something it’s a tossup whether it will be included with your subscription or only available for buy/rent or on some other platform. It’s even more fun when there’s ‘copy’ of a movie included with Prime, and another available for buy/rent and and buy/rent version is at the top of the search results and the one you already paid for access to you have to scroll to see.

      • zeekaran
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        48 months ago

        Prime Video is changing at the end of this month. Ads or you can pay $3/mo.

        I’m actually just canceling instead.

      • @GBU_28@lemm.ee
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        18 months ago

        At least in my area prime shipping is insanely fast, but yes. My point was you get a physical item from Amazon where as the others are purely digital

  • @Jentu@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    38 months ago

    Truenas scale to host:

    Jellyfin (alternative to movie/tv streaming services)

    Navidrome (alternative to Apple Music/spotify)

    Obsidian

    The “-arr” services

    Tailscale (to access these services outside of my house)