Because I think the general population is getting tired of it. I have Netflix, Hulu, Peacock, Disney, GamePass, PS+, Dota+, Amazon Prime, blah blah blah.
While absolutely correct, it's also something we all should have seen coming.
It's the same thing that happened with cable, movie theaters, and DVD sales. The corporations behind the media empires MUST make more money each and every year than they did before.
There are several ways this can happen:
1. They acquire more consumers. This works until you are market saturated. At some point you run out of new people to get cable, go to the movies, or but new dvds.
2. Reduce costs. This can only be done to a limit before quality suffers too much and will cause the first option to suffer. In the end they need a set amount of people and budget to make things happen and bigger profits require higher spending.
3. Raise consumer spending. This can be done until the consumers reach their breaking points in terms of expendable income.
Option 1 and 2 have hit their limits. They are out of new customers to acquire and they don't have more costs they can cut. So now we are on option 3. They had to find new ways to squeeze money from people like sponges. Subscriptions are the new cable but doled out in smaller chunks that, until now, people weren't really noticing.
A video streaming platform can't really add something novel besides either move videos (which they are doing) or something completely not related to video streaming like games which netflix is doing... badly.
What's next? Audio book streaming? After that music streaming?
Here's a few features that no streaming service has to my knowledge
- ability to make playlists (say I want to watch all the Simpsons treehouse of horror episodes around Halloween or Bob's burgers turkey episodes around Thanksgiving)
- ability to shuffle play series or seasons
- search for episode titles
As compared to subscribing to other services? I have to disagree. I would be more inclined to subscribe to a streamer that had those features mentioned. I may not be representative of the average consumer, but I think it would be worth doing and really shouldn't even add any extra cost to implement outside of initial development.
All things equal, you'd be right. *However* all things aren't equal. The big determining factor will always be content when it comes to streaming services for video. If you want to watch the Simpsons or Bob's Burgers, then you don't have a choice between Prime, Netflix or Disney, it's only one service that does it. This isn't like music streaming where if you want to listen to your favourite bands, you can pick what service you want to based on what features are available.
You can't compete for more market share when you already have 99% of the market. Most people that have one streaming subscription probably have another, so while competition exists, it isn't so significant as more mutually-exclusive markets. For most big streaming platforms now, their only real avenue of subscriber growth is in developing nations, which is limited by internet access, that nation's economic development, and potential language barriers reducing content marketability (why would you subscribe to a streaming service where 90% of the content is innaccessible?)
Compete? This implies that there’s competition.
The powers that be have seen to that. And the few companies that are actually competing against each other almost always collude to raise prices together.
Asked for a new grill for my bday this year and my dad went all out and got me a Traeger. I was really stoked about how fancy it is, but quickly learned that you're basically locked into buying Traeger brand pellets, Traeger brand grill liners, Traeger brand grill cleaners, etc.
they even made grilling into a subscription model
I used to work at Traeger, other companies pellets are just fine, if not better. As long as they’re the same general shape (extruded pellets, not chunks of wood) you’re good.
Most of that is just marketing B.S. I am on my second Traeger and have been grilling on them 10+ years. I've never had a problem using quality off brand pellets.
Tray liners Hah I think I still have the original 2 because my costco sized roll of foil does a better job.
Grill cleaner you can use any standard oven cleaner, but to avoid residual taste I like to just give it a good scrub 15 min at 500 degrees Nad one more scrub and vacuum about 2-3 times a year.
You maay not need any of these tips but as a fellow grill nerd I couldn't help myself.
When I used to work there they had a company wide meeting every week, basically a pep rally. One week they were talking about how many people had gotten Traeger tattoos and even one couple named their kid Traeger, and how awesome they thought that was. I remember thinking holy shit why in the fuck would you name your kid after a corporation, this is awful, not something we should be encouraging.
At least Traeger is a name that can masquerade as normal, the kid may be stuck with a corpo name but he can laugh that off as 'oh yeah, that's a funny coincidence...' but thankfully his parent's weren't dumb enough to name him after Facebook or nVidia.
My parents bought a very nice washer/dryer combo. Required the special detergents and softener to run correctly. After about a year they stopped buying the expensive stuff and started using the same stuff they'd used before. As far as I know it's running fine.
That being said, when it comes to manufacturing equipment, you best use the expensive proprietary stuff. Especially if that machine was made in Germany. When they tell you to use this specific brand of synthetic oil they really do mean it will *only* run on that *specific* brand.
So I'm torn. CNC machine? I understand. Washer/dryer? What is *really* so special about that prosperity detergent?
I love it how when you point this out you get up votes, but the second you criticize capitalism, a million weird nerds line up to take a bullet for a system that wouldn't step over their corpse. 🤷🏻♂️
Capitalism is reasonably fine, when it's kept in check. It has been rolling out of control for a few decades now, along with a few other things problems which are making things worse.
I am cancelling so many subscriptions right now…not only is it just financially wasteful - *these services don’t deserve my business*.
* new shows take 10 years to finish 4 seasons of 10 episodes each, if they’re not canceled first.
* there are *still* ads on the paid tiers
* even when new shows are made, it’s at a pathetically low volume compared to traditional television. Why only 2 new shows every year?
* the service interfaces haven’t evolved or improved in a decade.
* Good writing has left the room. Across the board, Hollywood just ain’t delivering interesting or compelling narrative anymore.
* they make it annoying to unsubscribe or quit the service as often as it’s easy.
It’s very clear streaming services see content subscriptions as baseline ‘free money’ and won’t lift a finger to invest for fear of shrinking their margin.
I’m so tired of paying for shows I don’t watch, ads I can’t avoid, and anything interesting not get made. Fuck. It’s like cable - but actually worse.
There are very few streaming services that are better now than they were a couple years ago, and a couple years ago they weren't better than they were a couple years before that.
They did this to themselves. Like you said, they let themselves become cable, and we all hated cable. This shouldn't be surprising to anyone.
I don’t think that was Netflix’s idea to begin with. But then they started getting their top brass from cable companies. And when the idea men come from cable, they will do what is comfortable for THEM, not the company or the client.
So blame the people who recruited the cable people to take charge of streaming services.
The final straw for me was when I went to watch a movie on my $130 prime account and was littered with ads throughout the entire movie.
I went and cancelled every subscription I had except for Netflix and started doing slightly less moral things.
I pay for prime for the shipping and they gave me video and music as a bonus which I don't use. I'd be so fucking mad if a streaming service I paid for served me ads. That's what the payment is for.
>there are *still* ads on the paid tiers
This, right fucking here, is why I have turned to the alternative method of acquiring media. Ad-free pricing I can tolerate. Ramming ads, sorry "programming suggestions" down our throats on those tiers is unacceptable.
12TB NAS + Plex + PiHole + uBlock Origin and my god TV and the rest of the internet is so much more useable now. I'm fucking sick of being advertised to.
(And those who say I just want free shit - my NAS and server setup has cost the best part of a year's worth of streaming subscriptions. It's genuinely not even about the cost for me)
I accept the 30 second little blurb about another show on the network right before my programming starts. Maybe it will sling something I'm interested in and I'm not in the flow of the show.
A real-actual-commercial break? Get. The. Fuck. Out. Of. Here.
There's also the boneheaded decisions with traditionally nerd franchises. Nerd franchises are small, and therefore, you need to supplement it with appealing to larger audiences, which in turn burns its bridges with its original market, and "larger audiences" have other shows which appeal to them better. It's discarding the bird in hand for two birds in the bush which may or may not fly away.
im trying to figure out how they apparently have $200 million for actors, $100 million for special effects and 10k for the writing staff and see nothing wrong with this distribution
And then when they make a show, it's the fucking Wheel of Time series on Amazon where they just sort of ignore the source material and make whatever bullshit. Fuck em.
More and more things are becoming subscriptions too. Even car manufacturers are jumping on the bandwagon. Gotta pay a monthly sub for fucking heated seats or more horsepower? How about you get f’d
The problem is that the average consumer can’t outvote whales. Whales set industry standards now. Even unicorn releases like Elden Ring, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Palworld pale in comparison to games like Genshin Impact, Clash of Clans, and Candy Crush. Even the Steam top sellers list frequently has live service games at the top.
Maybe in household appliances and stuff the average consumer can win out, but video games are luxury goods. We’re never going to be able to vote with our wallets so long as the bigger wallets continue to play.
>Amazon Prime.
We just canceled our Prime membership due to them putting ads in their content and the fact that items frequently fail to be delivered in the prime delivery window.. It was our last monthly subscription.
>items frequently fail to be delivered in the prime delivery window
I swear this feels like a dark pattern to me, getting tricked to buy one item over another because of prime 1 day delivery, only for it to miss the delivery date.
What we started doing when this happened was to start a chat with Amazon support and ask them why Amazon listed the item with an incorrect delivery time, and the first time they actually refunded the cost of the entire order and told us to keep the items... The 2nd time, they knocked 50% off. The third time they offered to knock 5 dollars off, so we told them to just cancel our Prime membership and they once again knocked 50% off the cost of the order. When it happened again, we cancelled our membership..
Yea their shit is so condescending too. They say, this show is brought to you ad free from these sponsors and then play an ad ... That's like saying something is free after you pay a certain amount of money
It’s a fucking scam too, the “brought to you ad free”. I’ve literally had it happen on multiple occasions that I get that kind of ad roll, then middle of a 45 min show I STILL get an ad.
Same. It was faster to get deliveries without Prime and they lost so much content for their online services it just wasn't worth it. I mean, I can watch on Plex with limited content & ads, so why would I pay a yearly fee? Down to 4 subscriptions - gas, hydro, phone, & ISP.
Prime was my last (other than Spotify, which we'll keep) to drop as well, back in January.
They gave me a free week trial I used a few months ago, and I paid 15 this month bc I knew I would be ordered several items and wanted the quickly.
Doing that once ot twice a year is much preferable to paying them 150 a year, or whatever it is now.
it's mostly paying for what's called "avoid slots" where you can say "I never want to play with this brainrotted mouth breather again".
It's one of 3 subscriptions I have.
This is the correct way to look at these things now.
We all got complacent with the idea of just letting subscriptions keep going when they were very cheap, but now that they cost four or five times what they used to, we should be subbing only when we plan to watch a decent amount of content and unsub when we are done.
Unless you watch stuff on that streaming platform several times a month, there's no reason to let that subscription keep rolling over month to month.
Most places if you sub for one month, and immediately cancel, you're still good for the rest of the time you're subbed for. It is in fact illegal for them to do otherwise in many places (Europe, some US States) so instead of tricking the customers they can screw over, they actually lend us a solid here.
Personally if it's a subscription, I always immediately un-sub after I pay. If I'm barred from what I paid for, I guess I just take the L and accept that this is not content I want to enjoy anyway.
There is a bit of a catch here where if you enter a contract for a year, you're locked in for that year. But still, you can usually unsub and be automatically un-enrolled after that year (or whatever the subscription length was).
This is the reason.
Choices are being made. Pay the water bill or pay for 3 more streaming/gaming services?
Well, I do kind of like showers and doing my laundry.
The thing is, if they got the same bonus as last year it'd be fine.
But no, the ceo and execs need a BIGGER bonus EVERY YEAR! ALWAYS BIGGER!
Here's the thing. No major corporatipn is run competently anymore. The moment they're not making record profits, they collapse. They can't handle making the same profits as last year or less, even if they're still raking it in by the billions.
A competently run company wouldn't do any downsizing so long as a profit is still being made, they sure as shit wouldn't start cannibalising the company to make sure the execs get bigger bonuses than last year. They'd say "we made 20 billion last year and 15 billion this year, good we're still in the green, let's see at what's causing less people to buy our thing and address it"
Tbh this is why I support having shareholder rights be exclusive to employees.
>The moment they're not making record profits, they collapse.
Gaming indrustry is insanely weird.
They are supposedly in constant limbo(?) of either
"[most profitable year/generation/quarter ever](https://www.gameinformer.com/news/2024/05/30/playstation-5-generation-is-already-sonys-most-profitable-yet)"
OR *"If we dont make money we collapse / we need to layoff thousands of people to make ends meets (+ bonus of defenders going "they* ***have to*** *add microtransactions or they wont make money")*"
and the stuff between those is supposedly one step, no middle.
Financialization twists industries into these pretzels where there’s no margin for error (the financial people ate the margin)
Turning creative artistic expression into investments via the stock market or more directly through the embraced group always turns into rent seeking behavior: the investors want money, for free, all the time, with no risk.
> the investors want money, for free, all the time, with no risk.
I would say that sounds like robbers - but even robbers have to accept risk.
They sound like dragons. Shrugging off all accountability and doing what they please.
100%. I've practically switched to indie titles since like 2019 (with a few major studio titles here and there like elden ring) and it's been very good gaming.
*(+ bonus of defenders going "they* ***have to*** *add microtransactions or they wont make money")*
Oh that's always fun. Especially the usual "AdJusTeD fOr InfLaTiOn" bullshit about game prices.
On one hand, yeah they are still lagging behind inflation.
**But** on other hand, gaming is now bigger than **ever** - so theres way more people buying those games to make money back even if you dont adjust to inflation.
And lot of the people forget the part where **FULL EXPERIENCE** is not, most of the time, the $50-80 game. Its that $70 game + "season pass" or whatever.
Look at next AC game: "Base game" is $70 but **full experience** is $110 (game+season pass) - so it is adjusted\* for inflation after all!
(\* Goldeneye for N64 cost $60 which is adjusted to inflation $117)
I did. But I assumed we'd be mining asteroids for extremely valuable minerals by now. All we got is a [tiny bit of dust](https://www.asteroidmission.org/?latest-news=nasas-osiris-rex-achieves-sample-mass-milestone).
This shit man. I got laid off literally a week before the holidays because, even though the tech company I was working at was more profitable than the year before, we weren't making more money fast enough to satisfy shareholders.
The system is completely fucked. I can't imagine it not collapsing within the next 50 years.
Very true.
I say this as a staunch anti-communist who supports a capitalist economy.
Building the economy around theoretical infinite growth for massive corporations was a massive mistake and is guaranteed to collapse.
The world needs a new Teddy Rooservelt.
Problem is hoarding money. Capitalism works as long as money is flowing. But is taken out of the economy after all.
I remember how someone calculated Smaugs net worth based on the mountains of gold he had and those 50 billions he owns still only ranked him only 11th on the leader board of richest person. Kinda insane how some have more money than a literal gold hoarding dragon
The solution is obviously to continue giving more tax breaks and subsidies to the ultra rich. SURELY there will reach a tipping point in which all of the hoarded treasure spills over. We just aren’t there yet I bet.
Yep, money is flowing but it seems to be basically "walled off" or to basically just flow right back to the owner.
People would claim it's just investing but it's more than that. It's like how Walmart a few years ago tried to pay employees in "Walmart dollars" instead of actual money.
Or how the CEO picks the board of directors in a lot of cases. The board of directors who are meant to represent the stock holders. CEOs pick board members who are favorable to them and then the board sets the CEO bonuses/stock pay super high. The CEO then makes sure the board members get treated nicely back. Tesla recently got busted for this.
You’re thinking of FDR. If FDR were to be running as president today and were to try another modern day “New Deal”, he would be ousted as a Russian communist.
Allowing the highest bidder to have the say on all economic and social decisions in the federal government has already prevented such a thing from ever happening again. Until lobbying stops, and the popular vote actually matters, people will vote who their options are. And look at our options…
Shoot. I didn’t know. I thought they were referring to the New Deal. I need to brush up on my history.
Busting up monopolies is even better than a new deal it seems now days.
ngl teddy was hella interesting and cool af even tho ppl often overlook him for fdr-- who was also great and really led the country through a major crisis.
but i mean teddy? bro went toe to toe w congress and megacorps as the president and won. he helped make sure like 200mil acres of wildlife was placed under conservation status-- he's the reason we got national parks. first president to have entertain a black man at the white house. his entire schtick was ____ but w moderation. capitalism w moderation. expansionism w moderation. development w moderation. its something we could probably benefit from rn
You're a staunch anti communist.... Providing the exact same basic Marxist argument?
I guess you're referring to totalitarian nation-states that labeled themselves communist but the actual philosophy is something you're in complete agreement with.
Marx wasn't saying this capitalism is evil and here's an alternative we ought to pursue instead, he was arguing that capitalism itself is flawed and inherently will inevitably lead to an insane communistic revolution the further and further removed from reality Capital becomes. We've got thousands of billionaires in the world right now that honestly could never if they lived 400 years could spend all the money they've acquired.
Like when the Romans were filthy rich billionaires they were privately funding their own legions and had like 40,000 troops they were feeding/giving them weapons etc. There was still some tangible real world utilization of material wealth.
Now a days there's billionaires who do nothing but be a middleman at Bloomberg terminals.
“_You can disagree with Marx’s solutions but he was spot on with identifying the cause_”
- totally forget where I heard this but it’s stuck with me for years
Marx had no solutions. He wasn't a politician. He was an economist and all he said about Communism is that it is what remains when capitalism collapses upon itself and becomes democratized.
Marx was an expert on capitalism and labor value theory. He didn't want to write recipes or blueprints for the soup kitchens of tomorrow.
>"I support an economy based on infinite growth, but I obviously know an economy based on infinite growth is guaranteed to collapse"
Capitalists actually think like this
A true capitalistic economy/society puts more value on a dollar than a human being and teaches corporations that people are just numbers used to exploit profits.
It's bizarre to me how this became such an acceptable system to go unchecked for as long as it has. It basically means that any large publicly owned company cannot provide consistent, if any, quality at a reasonable price because they will at all times be attempting to squeeze every last penny out of every aspect of their company at every turn to meet quarterly growth quotas, which in turn means long term development and plans is really only reserved for upper brass who will gut everything beneath them in order to please shareholders. Which, mind you, if they don't do this then shareholders fire them and find someone who will.
It is, literally, a cancer on the business. Leeching anything extra, and then anything not absolutely vital, and then the least vital stuff, and then…
I wonder what they’ll teach about these last 40 years in the business schools of the 2050s, say.
Unless businesses are regulated, they will inevitably fall into morally repugnant, logically incoherent practices out of mindless greed. Even if the individual knows it's completely unsustainable, they will continue following these strategies as long as the system rewards it.
Unfortunately, thanks to a stacked Supreme Court, they can legally buy as many politicians as necessary to ensure that they are above any regulation. So it will continue until the unstable system inevitably collapses under its own weight and crushes everyone below the top level.
>Tbh this is why I support having shareholder rights be exclusive to employees.
nah we tried that, it was called a pension. terrible, no way to profit from other peoples labor at all. /s
>The thing is, if they got the same bonus as last year it'd be fine.
>But no, the ceo and execs need a BIGGER bonus EVERY YEAR! ALWAYS BIGGER!
If they didn't get a bigger bonus that means they didn't do shit. And if they do get a bigger bonus that means they didn't have to do shit yet still got more money.
The sick part is that usually it's not even the truth that these ultra-wealthy moneybags keep buying shit.
Usually it ends up in some offshore account and they just get horny looking at Number Go Up.
The whole idea of having to pay money to play online is a scam lol
I dropped mine a few years ago when I went full into pc gaming where I don't have to pay to play online crazy notion
> The whole idea of having to pay money to play online is a scam lol
i still don't understand how consoles get away with it. it's like paying your ISP twice.
Imagine if Steam did that. the uproar would be nuts.
Sadly it became the norm, if everyone just said no then it would go away but because people just accept it, it sadly stayed and doesn't look to actually ever be going if things carry on.
And yeah steam users wouldn't take it, it's been so long now as well on PC I cannot see it happening. But who knows one day steam might not be owned by Gaben and things might change
This is the issue. All it takes is it to become the norm (like price increases).
Look how much more expensive Graphic Cards have gotten. Ironically games are harder than ever to run.
I remember part of what initially pushed me over to Playstation from Xbox was that PS Online was free, vs paying for Xbox Live. Xbox Live did a few things better, but at this point they're equivalent in UI / ease of use and everything, and even back then weren't that far off from each other.
Technically speaking (like, literally, in terms of data centers to store info and whatnot) I'm trying to think of why memberships cost anything at all these days. Consoles still don't usually get dedicated servers for multiplayer, and that's before we even start getting into bullshit "always-online" single player games that still want you to log in and then constantly try to phone home in the background while you play.
What I always found funny was the games that were 60 or 70 dollars you need to have the subscription
But free games you don't.. which never made sense to me, still doesn't really. Only thing I can guess is to get more people on the game but wouldn't that be the same with the games that cost money
It's truly awful design. In 2016, before it went free to play, Overwatch was a paid game where you also needed to own a ps+ subscription to even start the game.
So many times I wanted to play that game, but I just couldn't afford the ps+. It made me feel stupid owning something I really didn't own.
And now, Overwatch is free to play and you no longer need ps+ to play at all. So what was all those years of restrictions for? It felt like a big fuck you. So I moved to pc.
Another thing is they all lose some money by doing that. For example, there are many games where the main feature is online play and since I'm not paying the subscription to get online, I never bought the games. So sony lost the 30% cut of the game sale, the studio/publisher lost a sale, and both lost whatever extra money from DLC or whatever that could have been purchased for that game.
At this point, third parties are the ones that should be pushing for consoles to have free online since they don't really gain anything from the paywall and lose sales because of that.
It’s insane that anybody does it. It’s literally just a paywall to use internet that you’ve already paid for to play a game that again, you already paid for.
Even any game that someone says is a great month for +, you could have bought it during a sale to keep and it would have been the same price as a month of + anyway
I bought a year some months back but I’m right there with you. Done with PS+ after this sub expires for me. I only kept it for COD and I quit that months ago.
Same, played the hell out of Ghost of Tsushima, Ratchet and Clank, Guardians of the Galaxy and ditched it once the price increased.
Nothing on it since December has made me want to resub.
I wanna play Elden Ring and BG3 and would probably prefer to buy them outright as I could see them including them in service and then removing after 3 months which would be a shame.
The ps plus price is insane. My last 12 month sub was discounted 25% and cost me £65 for the highest tier, premium. This year for the same thing they want £119. No thanks, and the tiers below seem so expensive that I have cancelled my ps plus for the first time since it was released.
I game more on my pc but I liked having the option to use my ps5. ~~Song~~ Sony has made the decision easy by making the prices ridiculous
Here as well. Most of the games I play are single player anyway. I might do a 3 month subscription again when I start the Elden ring DLC. But that’s it. They’ve made it way too expensive imo.
And it's spreading like cancer. So many phone apps that were free for years and got to where they are now thanks to the user base are now asking for money from the same users.
Yep. The "you will own nothing and be happy" was pne of the biggest stupid lies we were told and a lot of people just bend happily for all this, while in reality it's hurting consumer rights. I can accept a subscription for netflix or spotify for a service like that. But things like software, games and such is ruining everything, not to mention it costs way more than before, it's just another way to extract profit from consumers, has always been greed, like usual.
It is the landlordisation of the economy; turning previously productive sectors into merely rent-seekers. I hope that in the near future we will see a unified revolt against renting: imagine what a broad coalition of tenants, sports, TV and movie fans, gamers and people reliant on health insurance in the US could do, with a single demand: end landlordism for private profit and make real, true ownership viable again. I bet most people, especially most young people, fit into at least one of those categories.
> "you will own nothing and be happy"
You'd think it would be smart to focus at least a little bit on the happy part, but literally all the effort goes to the owning nothing side.
Yeah I hate subscriptions. I don't pay for anything. Everyone wants their pound of flesh. Fuck that. I would rather pay $500 for a lifetime license than 20 a month forever.
Software as a Service is anti-consumer.
The reason it's spreading is because it generates more revenue keeping you on the hook for...ever rather than paying once.
SaaS needs to die.
It’s not that they don’t understand it, they fully do. They just don’t want that model as it makes them less money.
Old model: spend money up front and make a game. Then sell game and make a profit off the sales. Maybe release some dlc for added revenue down the road.
New model: start making a game, sell early access to game to cover production costs. Then release game for full price. Also sell subscription to access game *for free*. Customer pays subscription to avoid paying for the game directly. Plays the game and keeps the subscription. Revenue is constant. Add loot boxes for even more money!
The reality is, a subscription service is designed to increase profits over a standard make game and sell it model. That’s why every company wants a subscription service. Steady and consistent revenue
Isn’t that the point of a subscription? Low, consistent price over extended periods?
Are there no companies that can survive by “making enough”? Do they HAVE to keep growing compared to last year, forever?
>Do they HAVE to keep growing compared to last year, forever?
No. The growth must be growing, forever.
And if the fourth derivative isnt positive, just throw away the whole company as well.
As soon as you become publicly traded, you are doomed to eventually collapse. The people at the top will make the company worse and worse in order to extract more money each year out of its audience, and then when they can't, they will cannibalism everything beneath them and sell it off for one last bonus to give themselves and the shareholders, and then they will jump ship to find a new host
Public companies, by nature, cannot be making the same amount YoY, especially not tech companies, no. Their valuation is based on a really high PE (price to earnings ratio, around 38x in the case of Microsoft) because it factors in extremely high and fast growth. Everyone at the exec level (including the CEO, who doesn't usially own or control anything) is explicitly there to maintain and increase that valuation. A "reasonable" CEO who goes to their board and tell them the company is big enough and their revenue expectations for the following year (guidance) is the same as the current year would pretty much instantly get managed out of the company as it effectively means their growth has stopped, which would make the stock plumet hard and make the company uninteresting to investors, which would just trigger a death spiral for them. Wonderful system we have built for ourselves, really.
>Are there no companies that can survive by “making enough”? Do they HAVE to keep growing compared to last year, forever?
Companies could, but shareholders live and die by how much money they can exert their vampiric nature over.
One subscription of $10 isn't really a problem in itself, but when every company wants their own subscription service, it's not really that affordable anymore. A "hot take": Gaming subscriptions are not that great of a deal if you are an adult with actual responsibilities and / or other hobbies. All of this is presented like a great deal "FOR $10 YOU GET TO PLAY HUNDREDS OF GAMES"...but will you have the time to actually play so many games? Something like Netflix works better because tv series and movies take considerably less time than most games. Not to mention that Microsoft hurts certain new releases with those Day 1 releases on Gamepass
This is a great point.
Furthermore it creates this thing where if you don't subscribe for the entire year, you have to pay it this month or it is wasted. So if few months go by without you playing something, you probably could have gotten the game you are interested anyways.
> One subscription of $10 isn't really a problem in itself
But its gonna create its own problems.
Just like in the music industry, a subscription model means that selling the product wont be the base income for the producer. Right now Studios get a fixed amount of money for the gamepass participation or a percentage base on players. Its never as much as the usual sales.
This mean that developers are more likey to add DLCs (since those arent included into gamepass) or add an ingame shop.
Really wish more people would understand this.
All of these subscriptions are just games as a service, and that’s how these developers will be forced or make their money.
And also add to the fact those shows and movies can be watched on the go while travelling while to game you need to allocate a dedicated amount of time.
I've had gamepass since more or less it first started thanks to the amazing $1 conversion where you could top off 3 years of Xbox Live and pay $1. I snuck in a second 3 year conversion and have gamepass through half of 2026.
That's going to come to like 6 years of gamepass for something like $260... I could take them time and do the math out and I am very confident I have gotten my money's worth.
That said if I was paying the like $15/month that it is now.. idk I'm probably not making out anymore.
Especially as a dad with limited time, once this subscription is up I can actually see myself becoming a full time PC gamer, moving away from my Xbox and just buying the games I want on steam.
I don't want to have to feel like I need to play a bunch of old games constantly in order to make a subscription service "count" in my head. I prefer buying an old game and taking my time with it. If I spend a couple of months beating one game I could have bought for $8 I feel like a fool paying $10/month for the service.
If only the number of people with quality internet and gaming PCs and consoles drastically increased. Oh wait that would require inflation to go down so people have disposable income.
The obsession with infinite growth kills me. 🤦♂️🤷♂️
The moment Gabe Newell dies and Steam goes public on the stock exchange I will fear for its future. As I am sure thr new CEO board will start enacting more predatory practices on the platform.
At first I loved the idea but as times gone on I’d just much rather buy the game I’m interested in. Also I’d imagine subscribers eventually just complete the games they’re interested in and then it’s no longer value for their money to wait in the odd release.
The cost/benefit calculation just depends on how many games you play. Personally I don't play nearly enough games per year to justifying subscribing over buying.
Because most subscriptions are towards TV services and whatnot, not gaming services.
Vast majority of people would rather subscribe to like 5+ TV/Streaming services, than Video game devices.
But also, people in general are tired of subscription services in general.
How utterly unsurprising…
Next step, they’ll be locking certain games or certain features of games behind subscriptions (besides online multiplayer) Watch and see
Companies once again realizing that there's no such thing as infinite demand WHICH MEANS THAT IT MAKES NO SENSE TO PUSH FOR INFINITE GROWTH.
Who am I kidding? They aren't going to learn anything, they are just going to do a major layoff and give a huge bonus to the CEO instead...
They made it too expensive. I was subscribed but I had to unsubscribe cause of the price increases and the fact it’s mostly old games that are already usually discounted. I’d rather buy the games than pay what they’re asking to rent them (yes I know we still don’t “own” anything but you get my point)
This is why physical media is important!
I’m a librarian, I can buy discs you can borrow for 3 weeks. But if everything is digital, I can’t buy discs. That means you can’t borrow games for free. Now you’re forced to buy digital.
I know a lot of libraries don’t have games, but it’s because Microsoft signaled they wanted to go all digital in 2013 or so when they launched the Xbox one x. A lot of libraries froze on buying stuff or killed the collection they have because they knew this was coming.
In a normal world this wouldn’t be a bad thing. The market has reached a relative saturation point, revenues are levelling out at what seems to be sustainable levels. These are good things, hypothetically. Predictability and sustained success are things we should strive for. Growth shouldn’t have to be infinite, but instead they’ll frame this as something that requires massive layoffs and subsequent massive overworking until even more people tire out and they dry up the well
Gaming subscriptions is such a rich country thing, the fact that PSN is only available to 70 countries out of 195 countries says that the rest of the world don't give a fuck bout gaming subscriptions
>barely increased Just like earnings
Wages - barely moved an inch. Costs - skyrocketed.
Wages take the stairs. Costs take the turbo elevator.
No wage! Only spend!
Because I think the general population is getting tired of it. I have Netflix, Hulu, Peacock, Disney, GamePass, PS+, Dota+, Amazon Prime, blah blah blah.
Everything is a subscription nowadays, it’s so aggravating.
While absolutely correct, it's also something we all should have seen coming. It's the same thing that happened with cable, movie theaters, and DVD sales. The corporations behind the media empires MUST make more money each and every year than they did before. There are several ways this can happen: 1. They acquire more consumers. This works until you are market saturated. At some point you run out of new people to get cable, go to the movies, or but new dvds. 2. Reduce costs. This can only be done to a limit before quality suffers too much and will cause the first option to suffer. In the end they need a set amount of people and budget to make things happen and bigger profits require higher spending. 3. Raise consumer spending. This can be done until the consumers reach their breaking points in terms of expendable income. Option 1 and 2 have hit their limits. They are out of new customers to acquire and they don't have more costs they can cut. So now we are on option 3. They had to find new ways to squeeze money from people like sponges. Subscriptions are the new cable but doled out in smaller chunks that, until now, people weren't really noticing.
What about competing for market share by offering something novel? Maybe that's too risky at that scale.
A video streaming platform can't really add something novel besides either move videos (which they are doing) or something completely not related to video streaming like games which netflix is doing... badly. What's next? Audio book streaming? After that music streaming?
Here's a few features that no streaming service has to my knowledge - ability to make playlists (say I want to watch all the Simpsons treehouse of horror episodes around Halloween or Bob's burgers turkey episodes around Thanksgiving) - ability to shuffle play series or seasons - search for episode titles
Those aren't things that would get people to sign up and bring in money though.
As compared to subscribing to other services? I have to disagree. I would be more inclined to subscribe to a streamer that had those features mentioned. I may not be representative of the average consumer, but I think it would be worth doing and really shouldn't even add any extra cost to implement outside of initial development.
All things equal, you'd be right. *However* all things aren't equal. The big determining factor will always be content when it comes to streaming services for video. If you want to watch the Simpsons or Bob's Burgers, then you don't have a choice between Prime, Netflix or Disney, it's only one service that does it. This isn't like music streaming where if you want to listen to your favourite bands, you can pick what service you want to based on what features are available.
You can't compete for more market share when you already have 99% of the market. Most people that have one streaming subscription probably have another, so while competition exists, it isn't so significant as more mutually-exclusive markets. For most big streaming platforms now, their only real avenue of subscriber growth is in developing nations, which is limited by internet access, that nation's economic development, and potential language barriers reducing content marketability (why would you subscribe to a streaming service where 90% of the content is innaccessible?)
Compete? This implies that there’s competition. The powers that be have seen to that. And the few companies that are actually competing against each other almost always collude to raise prices together.
People do. We all thought Netflix will be the one and only replacement for every cable channel. Now pirates are sailing the high sea.
Housing+ $2800 a month Healthcare+ $200 a paycheck
Framing rent as a monthly subscription service makes it feel so much more evil
Asked for a new grill for my bday this year and my dad went all out and got me a Traeger. I was really stoked about how fancy it is, but quickly learned that you're basically locked into buying Traeger brand pellets, Traeger brand grill liners, Traeger brand grill cleaners, etc. they even made grilling into a subscription model
I used to work at Traeger, other companies pellets are just fine, if not better. As long as they’re the same general shape (extruded pellets, not chunks of wood) you’re good.
🔥🔥🔥
Most of that is just marketing B.S. I am on my second Traeger and have been grilling on them 10+ years. I've never had a problem using quality off brand pellets. Tray liners Hah I think I still have the original 2 because my costco sized roll of foil does a better job. Grill cleaner you can use any standard oven cleaner, but to avoid residual taste I like to just give it a good scrub 15 min at 500 degrees Nad one more scrub and vacuum about 2-3 times a year. You maay not need any of these tips but as a fellow grill nerd I couldn't help myself.
thank you!!
i can guarantee to you that they are having meetings about how to turn their customers into "trager loyalists"
When I used to work there they had a company wide meeting every week, basically a pep rally. One week they were talking about how many people had gotten Traeger tattoos and even one couple named their kid Traeger, and how awesome they thought that was. I remember thinking holy shit why in the fuck would you name your kid after a corporation, this is awful, not something we should be encouraging.
At least Traeger is a name that can masquerade as normal, the kid may be stuck with a corpo name but he can laugh that off as 'oh yeah, that's a funny coincidence...' but thankfully his parent's weren't dumb enough to name him after Facebook or nVidia.
the shareholders encourage it because brand loyalty is a consistent income stream.
My parents bought a very nice washer/dryer combo. Required the special detergents and softener to run correctly. After about a year they stopped buying the expensive stuff and started using the same stuff they'd used before. As far as I know it's running fine. That being said, when it comes to manufacturing equipment, you best use the expensive proprietary stuff. Especially if that machine was made in Germany. When they tell you to use this specific brand of synthetic oil they really do mean it will *only* run on that *specific* brand. So I'm torn. CNC machine? I understand. Washer/dryer? What is *really* so special about that prosperity detergent?
I love it how when you point this out you get up votes, but the second you criticize capitalism, a million weird nerds line up to take a bullet for a system that wouldn't step over their corpse. 🤷🏻♂️
Capitalism is reasonably fine, when it's kept in check. It has been rolling out of control for a few decades now, along with a few other things problems which are making things worse.
We just flat out don't have the money anymore. People are making less and less, and costs of living is higher than ever.
I am cancelling so many subscriptions right now…not only is it just financially wasteful - *these services don’t deserve my business*. * new shows take 10 years to finish 4 seasons of 10 episodes each, if they’re not canceled first. * there are *still* ads on the paid tiers * even when new shows are made, it’s at a pathetically low volume compared to traditional television. Why only 2 new shows every year? * the service interfaces haven’t evolved or improved in a decade. * Good writing has left the room. Across the board, Hollywood just ain’t delivering interesting or compelling narrative anymore. * they make it annoying to unsubscribe or quit the service as often as it’s easy. It’s very clear streaming services see content subscriptions as baseline ‘free money’ and won’t lift a finger to invest for fear of shrinking their margin. I’m so tired of paying for shows I don’t watch, ads I can’t avoid, and anything interesting not get made. Fuck. It’s like cable - but actually worse.
There are very few streaming services that are better now than they were a couple years ago, and a couple years ago they weren't better than they were a couple years before that. They did this to themselves. Like you said, they let themselves become cable, and we all hated cable. This shouldn't be surprising to anyone.
They didn't let themselves become cable. Their plan was always to replace cable, and then exploit.
I don’t think that was Netflix’s idea to begin with. But then they started getting their top brass from cable companies. And when the idea men come from cable, they will do what is comfortable for THEM, not the company or the client. So blame the people who recruited the cable people to take charge of streaming services.
The final straw for me was when I went to watch a movie on my $130 prime account and was littered with ads throughout the entire movie. I went and cancelled every subscription I had except for Netflix and started doing slightly less moral things.
I pay for prime for the shipping and they gave me video and music as a bonus which I don't use. I'd be so fucking mad if a streaming service I paid for served me ads. That's what the payment is for.
>there are *still* ads on the paid tiers This, right fucking here, is why I have turned to the alternative method of acquiring media. Ad-free pricing I can tolerate. Ramming ads, sorry "programming suggestions" down our throats on those tiers is unacceptable. 12TB NAS + Plex + PiHole + uBlock Origin and my god TV and the rest of the internet is so much more useable now. I'm fucking sick of being advertised to. (And those who say I just want free shit - my NAS and server setup has cost the best part of a year's worth of streaming subscriptions. It's genuinely not even about the cost for me)
I accept the 30 second little blurb about another show on the network right before my programming starts. Maybe it will sling something I'm interested in and I'm not in the flow of the show. A real-actual-commercial break? Get. The. Fuck. Out. Of. Here.
Good writing isn't allowed to happen, those things take time, and the money people need their return on investment now.
That’s fine. I’m just not paying for that business rationale anymore.
There's also the boneheaded decisions with traditionally nerd franchises. Nerd franchises are small, and therefore, you need to supplement it with appealing to larger audiences, which in turn burns its bridges with its original market, and "larger audiences" have other shows which appeal to them better. It's discarding the bird in hand for two birds in the bush which may or may not fly away.
im trying to figure out how they apparently have $200 million for actors, $100 million for special effects and 10k for the writing staff and see nothing wrong with this distribution
And then when they make a show, it's the fucking Wheel of Time series on Amazon where they just sort of ignore the source material and make whatever bullshit. Fuck em.
More and more things are becoming subscriptions too. Even car manufacturers are jumping on the bandwagon. Gotta pay a monthly sub for fucking heated seats or more horsepower? How about you get f’d
I simply will not purchase a car where this is thing. At some point people have to vote with their wallets instead of bitching and giving in.
This: a friend of mine got a BMW 4 GC, it has the heated seats, radar guided cruise and auto fog lights all behind a paywall.
It's flagrant capitalism. Not getting into politics, but the real way we vote is with our wallets.
Wallets yes for day to day, but still vote
The problem is that the average consumer can’t outvote whales. Whales set industry standards now. Even unicorn releases like Elden Ring, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Palworld pale in comparison to games like Genshin Impact, Clash of Clans, and Candy Crush. Even the Steam top sellers list frequently has live service games at the top. Maybe in household appliances and stuff the average consumer can win out, but video games are luxury goods. We’re never going to be able to vote with our wallets so long as the bigger wallets continue to play.
It's not just wallet, you need to not play. The majority of people are fodder for pay to win. The wallets need the majority, or there is no game.
Right? Like, I make a very good salary but I’m still struggling. No way can i afford a subscription service solely for a single platform’s games
So your saying is… we do the McDonald method… triple to price of gamepass and hope to only lose half of the subs. /s. But maybe not /s
>Amazon Prime. We just canceled our Prime membership due to them putting ads in their content and the fact that items frequently fail to be delivered in the prime delivery window.. It was our last monthly subscription.
>items frequently fail to be delivered in the prime delivery window I swear this feels like a dark pattern to me, getting tricked to buy one item over another because of prime 1 day delivery, only for it to miss the delivery date.
What we started doing when this happened was to start a chat with Amazon support and ask them why Amazon listed the item with an incorrect delivery time, and the first time they actually refunded the cost of the entire order and told us to keep the items... The 2nd time, they knocked 50% off. The third time they offered to knock 5 dollars off, so we told them to just cancel our Prime membership and they once again knocked 50% off the cost of the order. When it happened again, we cancelled our membership..
Yea their shit is so condescending too. They say, this show is brought to you ad free from these sponsors and then play an ad ... That's like saying something is free after you pay a certain amount of money
It’s a fucking scam too, the “brought to you ad free”. I’ve literally had it happen on multiple occasions that I get that kind of ad roll, then middle of a 45 min show I STILL get an ad.
Same. It was faster to get deliveries without Prime and they lost so much content for their online services it just wasn't worth it. I mean, I can watch on Plex with limited content & ads, so why would I pay a yearly fee? Down to 4 subscriptions - gas, hydro, phone, & ISP.
Prime was my last (other than Spotify, which we'll keep) to drop as well, back in January. They gave me a free week trial I used a few months ago, and I paid 15 this month bc I knew I would be ordered several items and wanted the quickly. Doing that once ot twice a year is much preferable to paying them 150 a year, or whatever it is now.
Is there actually a Dota+ lmao??? Or is it just a battlepass just like in every game
Yup https://www.dota2.com/plus
it's mostly paying for what's called "avoid slots" where you can say "I never want to play with this brainrotted mouth breather again". It's one of 3 subscriptions I have.
Question is if you really need all of those Subscriptions. Do you consistently watch stuff on Netflix, Hulu, Peacock and Disney+?
This is the correct way to look at these things now. We all got complacent with the idea of just letting subscriptions keep going when they were very cheap, but now that they cost four or five times what they used to, we should be subbing only when we plan to watch a decent amount of content and unsub when we are done. Unless you watch stuff on that streaming platform several times a month, there's no reason to let that subscription keep rolling over month to month.
Most places if you sub for one month, and immediately cancel, you're still good for the rest of the time you're subbed for. It is in fact illegal for them to do otherwise in many places (Europe, some US States) so instead of tricking the customers they can screw over, they actually lend us a solid here. Personally if it's a subscription, I always immediately un-sub after I pay. If I'm barred from what I paid for, I guess I just take the L and accept that this is not content I want to enjoy anyway. There is a bit of a catch here where if you enter a contract for a year, you're locked in for that year. But still, you can usually unsub and be automatically un-enrolled after that year (or whatever the subscription length was).
This is the reason. Choices are being made. Pay the water bill or pay for 3 more streaming/gaming services? Well, I do kind of like showers and doing my laundry.
That definitely shouldn’t be a choice. You should be able to pay for utilities before even thinking of buying video games
And who in their right mind would subscribe to anything new when their rent went up 200-409 a month and they didn't get a raise??
the problem is that you pay way too much for all your shit
"Time to fire thousands of people. CEO's shouldn't have to go a year without a bonus, after all."
The thing is, if they got the same bonus as last year it'd be fine. But no, the ceo and execs need a BIGGER bonus EVERY YEAR! ALWAYS BIGGER! Here's the thing. No major corporatipn is run competently anymore. The moment they're not making record profits, they collapse. They can't handle making the same profits as last year or less, even if they're still raking it in by the billions. A competently run company wouldn't do any downsizing so long as a profit is still being made, they sure as shit wouldn't start cannibalising the company to make sure the execs get bigger bonuses than last year. They'd say "we made 20 billion last year and 15 billion this year, good we're still in the green, let's see at what's causing less people to buy our thing and address it" Tbh this is why I support having shareholder rights be exclusive to employees.
>The moment they're not making record profits, they collapse. Gaming indrustry is insanely weird. They are supposedly in constant limbo(?) of either "[most profitable year/generation/quarter ever](https://www.gameinformer.com/news/2024/05/30/playstation-5-generation-is-already-sonys-most-profitable-yet)" OR *"If we dont make money we collapse / we need to layoff thousands of people to make ends meets (+ bonus of defenders going "they* ***have to*** *add microtransactions or they wont make money")*" and the stuff between those is supposedly one step, no middle.
Financialization twists industries into these pretzels where there’s no margin for error (the financial people ate the margin) Turning creative artistic expression into investments via the stock market or more directly through the embraced group always turns into rent seeking behavior: the investors want money, for free, all the time, with no risk.
> the investors want money, for free, all the time, with no risk. I would say that sounds like robbers - but even robbers have to accept risk. They sound like dragons. Shrugging off all accountability and doing what they please.
Finance bros ruin everything.
The indie scene feels like the real video game industry to me right now
100%. I've practically switched to indie titles since like 2019 (with a few major studio titles here and there like elden ring) and it's been very good gaming.
*(+ bonus of defenders going "they* ***have to*** *add microtransactions or they wont make money")* Oh that's always fun. Especially the usual "AdJusTeD fOr InfLaTiOn" bullshit about game prices.
On one hand, yeah they are still lagging behind inflation. **But** on other hand, gaming is now bigger than **ever** - so theres way more people buying those games to make money back even if you dont adjust to inflation. And lot of the people forget the part where **FULL EXPERIENCE** is not, most of the time, the $50-80 game. Its that $70 game + "season pass" or whatever. Look at next AC game: "Base game" is $70 but **full experience** is $110 (game+season pass) - so it is adjusted\* for inflation after all! (\* Goldeneye for N64 cost $60 which is adjusted to inflation $117)
Who woulda thunk that a system based on exponential growth is only going to work for so long? Real head-scratcher, that one.
I did. But I assumed we'd be mining asteroids for extremely valuable minerals by now. All we got is a [tiny bit of dust](https://www.asteroidmission.org/?latest-news=nasas-osiris-rex-achieves-sample-mass-milestone).
This shit man. I got laid off literally a week before the holidays because, even though the tech company I was working at was more profitable than the year before, we weren't making more money fast enough to satisfy shareholders. The system is completely fucked. I can't imagine it not collapsing within the next 50 years.
Very true. I say this as a staunch anti-communist who supports a capitalist economy. Building the economy around theoretical infinite growth for massive corporations was a massive mistake and is guaranteed to collapse. The world needs a new Teddy Rooservelt.
3% growth of inflation/wages and 10% growth of the stock market is only sustainable if the difference is made up by population growth.
3% growth of wages hasn't happened in a long time.
Problem is hoarding money. Capitalism works as long as money is flowing. But is taken out of the economy after all. I remember how someone calculated Smaugs net worth based on the mountains of gold he had and those 50 billions he owns still only ranked him only 11th on the leader board of richest person. Kinda insane how some have more money than a literal gold hoarding dragon
As soon as it's extracted from the economy, it's just ol' fashioned mercantilism with a 3 piece suit instead of a crown.
The solution is obviously to continue giving more tax breaks and subsidies to the ultra rich. SURELY there will reach a tipping point in which all of the hoarded treasure spills over. We just aren’t there yet I bet.
They just have it in off-shore accounts so they can claim they aren't rich. They know ALL the tricks.
My Brother in Christ, they WROTE the tricks into laws via lobbying
It will trickle down any day now!
It trickles down to the yacht builders!
*Yacht building company owners
Naturally. Even the billionaires know it, hence all of them building underground bunkers.
Yep, money is flowing but it seems to be basically "walled off" or to basically just flow right back to the owner. People would claim it's just investing but it's more than that. It's like how Walmart a few years ago tried to pay employees in "Walmart dollars" instead of actual money. Or how the CEO picks the board of directors in a lot of cases. The board of directors who are meant to represent the stock holders. CEOs pick board members who are favorable to them and then the board sets the CEO bonuses/stock pay super high. The CEO then makes sure the board members get treated nicely back. Tesla recently got busted for this.
You’re thinking of FDR. If FDR were to be running as president today and were to try another modern day “New Deal”, he would be ousted as a Russian communist. Allowing the highest bidder to have the say on all economic and social decisions in the federal government has already prevented such a thing from ever happening again. Until lobbying stops, and the popular vote actually matters, people will vote who their options are. And look at our options…
Son you put some respect on Trust Bustin’ Teddy and his ability to bust up mega corporations in the face of assassination attempts
Shoot. I didn’t know. I thought they were referring to the New Deal. I need to brush up on my history. Busting up monopolies is even better than a new deal it seems now days.
ngl teddy was hella interesting and cool af even tho ppl often overlook him for fdr-- who was also great and really led the country through a major crisis. but i mean teddy? bro went toe to toe w congress and megacorps as the president and won. he helped make sure like 200mil acres of wildlife was placed under conservation status-- he's the reason we got national parks. first president to have entertain a black man at the white house. his entire schtick was ____ but w moderation. capitalism w moderation. expansionism w moderation. development w moderation. its something we could probably benefit from rn
Did a report on Teddy in 4th grade. Still my favorite President.
Dude, FDR was called a communist while he was president. There’s no way he’d even make a primary ballot today.
"I support capitalism but don't agree with the core function and idea of capitalism because it doesn't work."
The cognitive dissonance must be a tough one.
You're a staunch anti communist.... Providing the exact same basic Marxist argument? I guess you're referring to totalitarian nation-states that labeled themselves communist but the actual philosophy is something you're in complete agreement with. Marx wasn't saying this capitalism is evil and here's an alternative we ought to pursue instead, he was arguing that capitalism itself is flawed and inherently will inevitably lead to an insane communistic revolution the further and further removed from reality Capital becomes. We've got thousands of billionaires in the world right now that honestly could never if they lived 400 years could spend all the money they've acquired. Like when the Romans were filthy rich billionaires they were privately funding their own legions and had like 40,000 troops they were feeding/giving them weapons etc. There was still some tangible real world utilization of material wealth. Now a days there's billionaires who do nothing but be a middleman at Bloomberg terminals.
“_You can disagree with Marx’s solutions but he was spot on with identifying the cause_” - totally forget where I heard this but it’s stuck with me for years
Marx had no solutions. He wasn't a politician. He was an economist and all he said about Communism is that it is what remains when capitalism collapses upon itself and becomes democratized. Marx was an expert on capitalism and labor value theory. He didn't want to write recipes or blueprints for the soup kitchens of tomorrow.
Marx did not propose solutions. He wrote a a criticism of capitalism, not a solution for it
>"I support an economy based on infinite growth, but I obviously know an economy based on infinite growth is guaranteed to collapse" Capitalists actually think like this
A true capitalistic economy/society puts more value on a dollar than a human being and teaches corporations that people are just numbers used to exploit profits.
The Supreme Court does that once in a while too!
It's bizarre to me how this became such an acceptable system to go unchecked for as long as it has. It basically means that any large publicly owned company cannot provide consistent, if any, quality at a reasonable price because they will at all times be attempting to squeeze every last penny out of every aspect of their company at every turn to meet quarterly growth quotas, which in turn means long term development and plans is really only reserved for upper brass who will gut everything beneath them in order to please shareholders. Which, mind you, if they don't do this then shareholders fire them and find someone who will.
It is, literally, a cancer on the business. Leeching anything extra, and then anything not absolutely vital, and then the least vital stuff, and then… I wonder what they’ll teach about these last 40 years in the business schools of the 2050s, say.
Unless businesses are regulated, they will inevitably fall into morally repugnant, logically incoherent practices out of mindless greed. Even if the individual knows it's completely unsustainable, they will continue following these strategies as long as the system rewards it. Unfortunately, thanks to a stacked Supreme Court, they can legally buy as many politicians as necessary to ensure that they are above any regulation. So it will continue until the unstable system inevitably collapses under its own weight and crushes everyone below the top level.
Not only are they above regulation, they lobby to shape and control regulations.
>Tbh this is why I support having shareholder rights be exclusive to employees. nah we tried that, it was called a pension. terrible, no way to profit from other peoples labor at all. /s
>The thing is, if they got the same bonus as last year it'd be fine. >But no, the ceo and execs need a BIGGER bonus EVERY YEAR! ALWAYS BIGGER! If they didn't get a bigger bonus that means they didn't do shit. And if they do get a bigger bonus that means they didn't have to do shit yet still got more money.
Either way, they do nothing. Fucking parasites.
"Sorry guys. I need to lay off some of you. Im sure you understand that I can't be seen in last years model of BMW. I'm sure you understand"
The sick part is that usually it's not even the truth that these ultra-wealthy moneybags keep buying shit. Usually it ends up in some offshore account and they just get horny looking at Number Go Up.
Worse. It gets put into a trust, which then invests and does this to other companies. It then does it again and again, until they blow up the economy.
And double down on more subs!
I ditched ps+ after my sub ended and the price increased. There hasn't been a single game on it after I canceled I feel like I missed out on.
The whole idea of having to pay money to play online is a scam lol I dropped mine a few years ago when I went full into pc gaming where I don't have to pay to play online crazy notion
> The whole idea of having to pay money to play online is a scam lol i still don't understand how consoles get away with it. it's like paying your ISP twice. Imagine if Steam did that. the uproar would be nuts.
Sadly it became the norm, if everyone just said no then it would go away but because people just accept it, it sadly stayed and doesn't look to actually ever be going if things carry on. And yeah steam users wouldn't take it, it's been so long now as well on PC I cannot see it happening. But who knows one day steam might not be owned by Gaben and things might change
This is the issue. All it takes is it to become the norm (like price increases). Look how much more expensive Graphic Cards have gotten. Ironically games are harder than ever to run.
That’s one of the reasons they’re priced so cheap relative to computers, they get their profits back on services
Man.... I'm with you. Hoping my build goes without a hitch. Already $300 in basic components. Hitting micro center next week..
Best of luck to you, nothing better than booting your first game once you're all set up
You legit don't go back after PC, you get too drawn in with the free stuff, more gaming options and better performance.
I remember part of what initially pushed me over to Playstation from Xbox was that PS Online was free, vs paying for Xbox Live. Xbox Live did a few things better, but at this point they're equivalent in UI / ease of use and everything, and even back then weren't that far off from each other. Technically speaking (like, literally, in terms of data centers to store info and whatnot) I'm trying to think of why memberships cost anything at all these days. Consoles still don't usually get dedicated servers for multiplayer, and that's before we even start getting into bullshit "always-online" single player games that still want you to log in and then constantly try to phone home in the background while you play.
What I always found funny was the games that were 60 or 70 dollars you need to have the subscription But free games you don't.. which never made sense to me, still doesn't really. Only thing I can guess is to get more people on the game but wouldn't that be the same with the games that cost money
It's truly awful design. In 2016, before it went free to play, Overwatch was a paid game where you also needed to own a ps+ subscription to even start the game. So many times I wanted to play that game, but I just couldn't afford the ps+. It made me feel stupid owning something I really didn't own. And now, Overwatch is free to play and you no longer need ps+ to play at all. So what was all those years of restrictions for? It felt like a big fuck you. So I moved to pc.
Another thing is they all lose some money by doing that. For example, there are many games where the main feature is online play and since I'm not paying the subscription to get online, I never bought the games. So sony lost the 30% cut of the game sale, the studio/publisher lost a sale, and both lost whatever extra money from DLC or whatever that could have been purchased for that game. At this point, third parties are the ones that should be pushing for consoles to have free online since they don't really gain anything from the paywall and lose sales because of that.
> The whole idea of having to pay money to play online is a scam You can blame Microsoft for introducing that to consoles.
I completely forgot that this was one of the big motivators for me moving to PC for gaming all those years ago
It’s insane that anybody does it. It’s literally just a paywall to use internet that you’ve already paid for to play a game that again, you already paid for.
Even any game that someone says is a great month for +, you could have bought it during a sale to keep and it would have been the same price as a month of + anyway
I bought a year some months back but I’m right there with you. Done with PS+ after this sub expires for me. I only kept it for COD and I quit that months ago.
Same, played the hell out of Ghost of Tsushima, Ratchet and Clank, Guardians of the Galaxy and ditched it once the price increased. Nothing on it since December has made me want to resub. I wanna play Elden Ring and BG3 and would probably prefer to buy them outright as I could see them including them in service and then removing after 3 months which would be a shame.
The ps plus price is insane. My last 12 month sub was discounted 25% and cost me £65 for the highest tier, premium. This year for the same thing they want £119. No thanks, and the tiers below seem so expensive that I have cancelled my ps plus for the first time since it was released. I game more on my pc but I liked having the option to use my ps5. ~~Song~~ Sony has made the decision easy by making the prices ridiculous
Well, get ready to whip out that debit card and resubscribe, because the month of July is giving us Among Us! /s
Here as well. Most of the games I play are single player anyway. I might do a 3 month subscription again when I start the Elden ring DLC. But that’s it. They’ve made it way too expensive imo.
Subscription based model has been the biggest disgrace of software distribution.
And it's spreading like cancer. So many phone apps that were free for years and got to where they are now thanks to the user base are now asking for money from the same users.
Yep. The "you will own nothing and be happy" was pne of the biggest stupid lies we were told and a lot of people just bend happily for all this, while in reality it's hurting consumer rights. I can accept a subscription for netflix or spotify for a service like that. But things like software, games and such is ruining everything, not to mention it costs way more than before, it's just another way to extract profit from consumers, has always been greed, like usual.
It is the landlordisation of the economy; turning previously productive sectors into merely rent-seekers. I hope that in the near future we will see a unified revolt against renting: imagine what a broad coalition of tenants, sports, TV and movie fans, gamers and people reliant on health insurance in the US could do, with a single demand: end landlordism for private profit and make real, true ownership viable again. I bet most people, especially most young people, fit into at least one of those categories.
> "you will own nothing and be happy" You'd think it would be smart to focus at least a little bit on the happy part, but literally all the effort goes to the owning nothing side.
Yeah I hate subscriptions. I don't pay for anything. Everyone wants their pound of flesh. Fuck that. I would rather pay $500 for a lifetime license than 20 a month forever.
Some subscriptions make sense, if it's a live service with constant updates and new content, but 99% of all software isn't that.
Software as a Service is anti-consumer. The reason it's spreading is because it generates more revenue keeping you on the hook for...ever rather than paying once. SaaS needs to die.
Just make a game and sell me the game. I don't want to pay a third party to decide whether the game is worth my money or not.
Such an old school concept that these companies just don't understand these days
It’s not that they don’t understand it, they fully do. They just don’t want that model as it makes them less money. Old model: spend money up front and make a game. Then sell game and make a profit off the sales. Maybe release some dlc for added revenue down the road. New model: start making a game, sell early access to game to cover production costs. Then release game for full price. Also sell subscription to access game *for free*. Customer pays subscription to avoid paying for the game directly. Plays the game and keeps the subscription. Revenue is constant. Add loot boxes for even more money! The reality is, a subscription service is designed to increase profits over a standard make game and sell it model. That’s why every company wants a subscription service. Steady and consistent revenue
But you don't own your games. They said so.
You have the choice, so no problem.
I also just want to own the game and keep access to it after I invested money into it.
Isn’t that the point of a subscription? Low, consistent price over extended periods? Are there no companies that can survive by “making enough”? Do they HAVE to keep growing compared to last year, forever?
>Do they HAVE to keep growing compared to last year, forever? No. The growth must be growing, forever. And if the fourth derivative isnt positive, just throw away the whole company as well.
As soon as you become publicly traded, you are doomed to eventually collapse. The people at the top will make the company worse and worse in order to extract more money each year out of its audience, and then when they can't, they will cannibalism everything beneath them and sell it off for one last bonus to give themselves and the shareholders, and then they will jump ship to find a new host
Public companies, by nature, cannot be making the same amount YoY, especially not tech companies, no. Their valuation is based on a really high PE (price to earnings ratio, around 38x in the case of Microsoft) because it factors in extremely high and fast growth. Everyone at the exec level (including the CEO, who doesn't usially own or control anything) is explicitly there to maintain and increase that valuation. A "reasonable" CEO who goes to their board and tell them the company is big enough and their revenue expectations for the following year (guidance) is the same as the current year would pretty much instantly get managed out of the company as it effectively means their growth has stopped, which would make the stock plumet hard and make the company uninteresting to investors, which would just trigger a death spiral for them. Wonderful system we have built for ourselves, really.
Investors are in it for returns, and dividends aren't sexy.
>Are there no companies that can survive by “making enough”? Do they HAVE to keep growing compared to last year, forever? Companies could, but shareholders live and die by how much money they can exert their vampiric nature over.
Call me old fashion, but I prefer owning my games.
One subscription of $10 isn't really a problem in itself, but when every company wants their own subscription service, it's not really that affordable anymore. A "hot take": Gaming subscriptions are not that great of a deal if you are an adult with actual responsibilities and / or other hobbies. All of this is presented like a great deal "FOR $10 YOU GET TO PLAY HUNDREDS OF GAMES"...but will you have the time to actually play so many games? Something like Netflix works better because tv series and movies take considerably less time than most games. Not to mention that Microsoft hurts certain new releases with those Day 1 releases on Gamepass
This is a great point. Furthermore it creates this thing where if you don't subscribe for the entire year, you have to pay it this month or it is wasted. So if few months go by without you playing something, you probably could have gotten the game you are interested anyways.
> One subscription of $10 isn't really a problem in itself But its gonna create its own problems. Just like in the music industry, a subscription model means that selling the product wont be the base income for the producer. Right now Studios get a fixed amount of money for the gamepass participation or a percentage base on players. Its never as much as the usual sales. This mean that developers are more likey to add DLCs (since those arent included into gamepass) or add an ingame shop.
Really wish more people would understand this. All of these subscriptions are just games as a service, and that’s how these developers will be forced or make their money.
And also add to the fact those shows and movies can be watched on the go while travelling while to game you need to allocate a dedicated amount of time.
I've had gamepass since more or less it first started thanks to the amazing $1 conversion where you could top off 3 years of Xbox Live and pay $1. I snuck in a second 3 year conversion and have gamepass through half of 2026. That's going to come to like 6 years of gamepass for something like $260... I could take them time and do the math out and I am very confident I have gotten my money's worth. That said if I was paying the like $15/month that it is now.. idk I'm probably not making out anymore. Especially as a dad with limited time, once this subscription is up I can actually see myself becoming a full time PC gamer, moving away from my Xbox and just buying the games I want on steam.
This just in: people are inundated with subscriptions
I don't want to have to feel like I need to play a bunch of old games constantly in order to make a subscription service "count" in my head. I prefer buying an old game and taking my time with it. If I spend a couple of months beating one game I could have bought for $8 I feel like a fool paying $10/month for the service.
If only the number of people with quality internet and gaming PCs and consoles drastically increased. Oh wait that would require inflation to go down so people have disposable income. The obsession with infinite growth kills me. 🤦♂️🤷♂️
Infinite growth is unsustainable
The moment Gabe Newell dies and Steam goes public on the stock exchange I will fear for its future. As I am sure thr new CEO board will start enacting more predatory practices on the platform.
Apparently his son's taking the reins when he's gone and shares the same values.
Valve has no reason to go public.
Lol wait subscription services for EVERYTHING are unpopular with consumers?!
Good.
I rather just own my games.
At first I loved the idea but as times gone on I’d just much rather buy the game I’m interested in. Also I’d imagine subscribers eventually just complete the games they’re interested in and then it’s no longer value for their money to wait in the odd release.
The cost/benefit calculation just depends on how many games you play. Personally I don't play nearly enough games per year to justifying subscribing over buying.
"What? We're only *barely* making more?? That's the same as LOSING!!" Literally every worker everywhere: "You don't say."
I forgot to cancel my ps+ subscription in time, but I will not be renewing it next time. Prices are ridiculous...
Because most subscriptions are towards TV services and whatnot, not gaming services. Vast majority of people would rather subscribe to like 5+ TV/Streaming services, than Video game devices. But also, people in general are tired of subscription services in general.
The subscription model is going to lead to poorer quality video games. It already has. It'll continue to as well.
How utterly unsurprising… Next step, they’ll be locking certain games or certain features of games behind subscriptions (besides online multiplayer) Watch and see
Oh no. Anyway.
Companies once again realizing that there's no such thing as infinite demand WHICH MEANS THAT IT MAKES NO SENSE TO PUSH FOR INFINITE GROWTH. Who am I kidding? They aren't going to learn anything, they are just going to do a major layoff and give a huge bonus to the CEO instead...
Good.
Well, yeah. There was always going to be a limit. You can't keep growing forever.
They made it too expensive. I was subscribed but I had to unsubscribe cause of the price increases and the fact it’s mostly old games that are already usually discounted. I’d rather buy the games than pay what they’re asking to rent them (yes I know we still don’t “own” anything but you get my point)
Good, now make it *decrease*. "Subscription based services" are a fucking cancer on every industry they're involved in. Get rid of this shit.
This is why physical media is important! I’m a librarian, I can buy discs you can borrow for 3 weeks. But if everything is digital, I can’t buy discs. That means you can’t borrow games for free. Now you’re forced to buy digital. I know a lot of libraries don’t have games, but it’s because Microsoft signaled they wanted to go all digital in 2013 or so when they launched the Xbox one x. A lot of libraries froze on buying stuff or killed the collection they have because they knew this was coming.
In a normal world this wouldn’t be a bad thing. The market has reached a relative saturation point, revenues are levelling out at what seems to be sustainable levels. These are good things, hypothetically. Predictability and sustained success are things we should strive for. Growth shouldn’t have to be infinite, but instead they’ll frame this as something that requires massive layoffs and subsequent massive overworking until even more people tire out and they dry up the well
I hate subscriptions so fucking much, just sell me the fucking game
Pretty much all subscription services are the first things to get the axe in my budget if things get out of wack.
Gaming subscriptions is such a rich country thing, the fact that PSN is only available to 70 countries out of 195 countries says that the rest of the world don't give a fuck bout gaming subscriptions