It's just a coffee

"You will own nothing and you will be happy" - Some rich fuck

Ubisoft Says Gamers Should Get More Comfortable Not Owning Their Games
- 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.
- Misinformation. An article not as blatantly trying to manipulate people: https://www.ign.com/articles/ubisoft-exec-says-gamers-need-to-get-comfortable-not-owning-their-games-for-subscriptions-to-take-off?utm_source=twit
- 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.
- 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
Oh they expanded that? I remember when it was just "You will own nothing".
- 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.
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?
- 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

The only subscriptions I am willing to pay for:

Phone bill - no choice
Internet bill - no choice
Insurance - no choice
World of Warcraft - sue me
Costco membership - worth it
VPN - worth it

I don't pay for any others. Paid for lifetime Plex for the convenience of not needing to pay for a website domain like I would for jellyfin, and self host my own music, tv, and movies

3 of those are services. Most subscription shit we see these days are products that they want us to treat like services even though there is no on going consumption. All of these software subscription services are just grifts.
- The only thing he listed that isn't a service is his Costco membership.
Costco membership - worth it
Just got my Executive Membership rebate. It more than paid for the membership. We're basically shopping at Costco for free.
- Furthermore, Costco employees will never push you to get the executive membership, if your previous year did not have enough spending on it to at least pay back the difference.
  We actually had the Costco customer service Tell us to cancel our executive membership, because we didn't earn enough over the year
I'll pay you 3 quid a month for read access to your server.
Ha just kidding, fuck subscriptions

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

What is ad guard him?
- AdGuard Home, it's a DNS level ad blocker similar to PiHole
- Excuse me, but it's "they/them".

Subscriptions are O(n)

One time purchases are O(1)

You want O(1)..

I get that services need to pay for staff/servers/production, so I'm fine with small monthly fees. I'd much rather pay than sit through ads.

Once a subscription creeps over six or seven bucks a month I'm gonna reevaluate it and start cutting.

It really annoys me that newspapers charge the same for digital and paper subscriptions.

You're paying for the content in the case of the newspapers. It is a similar cost to print on newsprint as to run a website. It saves them no money. Most of what you are paying for is for the journalism, writing, editing, etc. Content costs money.
- That definitely depends on which news outlet we're talking about.
- Exactly. The reason I cancel my subscriptions is because there’s been a nosedive in content that I enjoy, which has tipped the scales to it costing more than it’s worth to me.
  I’ve moved to a Plex setup, but even then I don’t watch many shows at all. The ones I do watch are all on different platforms though, so it would be X many subscriptions just to watch the few shows I like.
- That's counterintuitive, do you have a source for that?
  EDIT: googling around, I don't see any obvious answers.
This is the point here.
Many people have no idea of the infrastructure and costs needed to run many of these servers that provide services to people.
I disagree with things like Adobe basically using it for DRM but have no issue for services that are literally serving millions of people and providing something worthwhile that the majority of the population would otherwise not know how to do on their own.
There is some nuance to it, like offering a service and then slowly creeping costs up or adding an advertisement tier and dropping everyone to that etc is crap. But in general, if they are providing a decent service then I don't really have a problem with it.

less than a cup of coffee

cup of coffee is now $12

🤕

Cup of coffee here is $0.1203668386

I hate people defending subscriptions. They are not required for anything other than insurance or something you guaranteed will keep, like phone contracts. If they need more money for content, release content packs and dlc. Online should not cost, especially if someone like Nintendo is using peer2peer or will shut down the online servers anyways at some point.

I prefer paying for services with my money insead of with my data, but I can see both sides.🤷
- Sure, I too would prefer to pay with money instead of data. But that's a false dichotomy. Many of the services that require subscription also collect your data. Whereas offline local solutions do not collect your data. There are things were you pay with money and data, there are things where you pay with just money, or just data, and there are things where you don't pay at all. So it isn't really a 'both sides' issue.
- Paying with your money and your data is more likely. The issue is not subscriptions imo either. It is getting sucked into megacorp schemes that will destroy competition with cheap prices and then enshittify and or raise prises once there is no alternative. Oh, and influence legislators to make competition illegal (youtube got big on copyright infringement).
  Therefore I reduce megacorp stuff. I shop local, watch my dvds and started buying music again.
  They can fuck off. So can everyone who has this neat reason why resistance to megacorps is futile.
- Subscription based service makes data harvesting much easier. Spotify can force you to connect to their server even if you downloaded your song, in the name of "verifying your subscription".
  Buy the songs, buy the movie, take them offline.
  That being said there are good subscription based service, like home assistant cloud, where all your communications are always E2E encrypted and cannot be seen by their server. Their subscription model is justified, as they rent their servers.
- I'm pretty sure you're paying with both as it is
- I prefer not paying
You shouldn't have to pay to use someone else's computer? Also there's more software than just games in the world, I don't see how loot boxes would work for google drive.
Online servers cost money.
Id rather an online game charge me a monthly subscription and give me access to all content rather than ftp with half the content in the cash shop.
- I also don't mind a subscription, if its reasonably priced and it's easy to cancel. But you could also have one time payment and all the content plus online. Elden Ring has that for example.

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!"

Also the price of a coffee has gone up considerably in the last couple years

Yo ho/All hands/Hoist the colors high

"Yo ho, fiddle-dee dee, a [REDACTED_DUE_TO_LEMMY.WORLD_POLICY]'s life for me!"
but also
"Having fun isn't hard if you have a library card!"
I've been checking out so many good shows and movies from my local public library
- The library feels like it should be illegal somehow. It's SO GOOD.

And they wonder why tides of the high seas is on the rise again.

Spotify makes sense to have based on pure convenience. NSO is alright, but if you already emulate, there's not much point in NSO due to Switch online multiplayer being ass. Paying for Adobe is amateur hour. Dropbox? Don't make me laugh. Twitter blue is just sad.

It feels wrong paying for Spotify knowing the artists get jack shit. Why bother
- if you want to support your favorite artist go to their concert, buy their album/merch.
  I personally don't care about any of that, personally I just want convenient music in one place, if there wasn't spotify, there would just be some pirated service where artists would earn nothing. or Radio where there is no exposure for lesser artists.
  so really I am not sure what kind of better solution you could come up with.
Join the dark side and buy music outright. Much better for the artists.
- Or do both. Cost of Spotify is the cost of one album a month.
I think Strato HiDrive offers a better price per gigabyte AAAND you can add support for SMB and FTP clients at low additional costs. Barely any cloud storage provider offers this one.

twitter is the most embarrassing one on here by a thousand miles

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

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.

Life worked perfectly fine before Netflix and Spotify, everything was also fine before cloud everything.
They can suck on my left nut.
- 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.

Honestly, if the service respects my privacy and isn't littered with ads, I don't mind paying at all. Like I wouldn't mind paying a monthly fee for services provided by Proton, for example, for email, online storage, vpn, etc. I think it's fair. There's a lot of infrastructure behind it and employees. Things don't just run by themselves for free.

But when I pay for a subscription and they publish ads as well for extra income, not only does it make my experience unpleasant, but it's incredibly greedy. And when I get charged for a service that exploits all my private data to create a user profile that can be sold and used to push targeted ads and other fake information with the goal of changing my opinion on important democratic topics, then that's when I start completely avoiding that service altogether.

Dropbox, Spotify, and a VPN are worth it: fight me.

Sure, Spotify doesn't pay artists enough and I miss having Neil Young available for streaming, but what are the other options that work well in the car? I'm not going to go back to using discs or plugging in MP3 players to the aux port, and I don't mind paying the bands directly for merch/albums if I'm really a fan. Considering I mostly listen to vinyl at home, I'm not paying Spotify for music; I'm paying Spotify for the convenience of being able to not listen to terrestrial radio and to be able to listen to what I like in the car or at work without the need for Youtube.

And my personal Dropbox account that I also use for work is well worth 15$/mo for 2TB of storage. It's saved me so much grief to be able to back up phone photos, access my work files from any computer, keep records of my personal documents, etc., and the software is both more cost effective and better designed than Google Drive or OneDrive. PDF's of my RPG books/characters/maps? Dropbox. Grocery list text file? Dropbox. Place to stash tabs/sheet music that is easily kept organized without the need for a physical copy? Dropbox. Phone number of that parent who saw my partner's car get tagged in the parking lot at school? Wait, I think I have her phone number in an spreadsheet from when I coached her daughter in tee-ball...gimme a sec...yep, it's in my Dropbox. In a side note, Dropbox may have turned me into a digital hoarder.

But the rest of this subscription-based garbage can get bent.

I recently switched from Spotify to Deezer. They offer high fidelity audio streaming which is a very noticable difference. Also, they're a bit cheaper, and you can easily move all your songs/saved playlists to Deezer
- You need to be a certain kind of person to perceive audio quality difference. One, you need to be able to detect the difference. Two, you need to be able to appreciate the difference. And Three, which everyone seems to ignore, you need to have bought a sufficiently expensive device that can make the difference.
  In short, if you have an $18 desktop speaker, get the FLAC outta here.
- That's a good tip; I hadn't heard of that one yet. Is their library as comprehensive as Spotify?
- Deezer should spread out their services to more countries.
Spotify is the only subscription I have. Don't listen to music a lot, but it's cheap and easy. For VPN, I rolled my own on a Digital Ocean VPS.
- that sounds like a subscription with extra steps lol
- I pay for Nord. But that's because I game and value it.
Plex +arrs takes care of all my music streaming wants
- Plex tanked right as I was watching a movie last week. It's an alternative, but not reliable.
$15/mo for 2 TB seems quite expensive tbh. My Nextcloud server with 1 TiB of storage costs €5 a month.
- It is a little pricey, but when I tried hosting my own server, it was way too much hassle (for me). Frankly, I don't mind paying Dropbox because they make the experience so fool-proof and borderline invisible.
  Dropbox runs in the background and just acts like just a local folder in your Documents folder (or wherever you put it). When you save anything there, it's automatically backed up online in real-time and added to any other computers you use that have Dropbox installed. If you have too much online for some of your devices, it will use a a "shadow file" that is just a link to the online file so it takes up zero space on your other local devices while acting just like the file is already local (in terms of being able to right-click, access properties, open it from other programs, etc.). Plus, it has built in functionality for sharing files or entire folders by giving you a quick download link with just two clicks, which is great for sharing files that are too large to send via email.
  Could I get all that functionality cheaper? Almost certainly. Could I find something cheaper that is also just as user-friendly? I'm open to it, but I haven't found anything yet that is close to competitive.
Apple Music pays out 2-3X more than Spotify to artists if that is something you are concerned about.
- It also has an absolutely terrible algorithm for recommending music in my experience. I’ve tried Apple Music several times over the past few years as I’m heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem. My experience never changes. I put in a random artist like Green Day or Hans Zimmer or Gregory Alan Isakov and within 4-5 songs the station is playing hip hop or rap. No matter what genre I start with the stream always turns into hip hop or rap and it’s mostly nobody artists that aren’t good. I have some songs in those genres in my library but the majority are not. (Also if I’m starting a station with an orchestral film score it stands to reason I probably want to hear more film scores not rap.)
- it also has loseless quality but the format is not flac but their own codec, so i don't know whether we can call them truly lossless.
I'll pay for Spotify when they start respecting my blocklist properly.
I have blocked Kanye West and he still shows up in recommended playlists somehow.
- I can't speak to that as I don't use any of the recommended playlists. It's pretty easy to avoid artists you don't like if you make your own playlists or pick your own music

I've been free for so long I forget what it's like

What do you use for music?
- "open directory" searches
  (+"index of" +filename +(mp3|ogg|flac|aac|m4a))
  yt-dlp
  xdcc

If a subscription would be as good as just having the file or software offline… I might even pay for it. Yes I mean including DRM-Free backups like www.gog.com

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.

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.

I’m not drinking 6 specialty cups of coffee every day.

Sounds like someone didn't have their morning coffee today
(It's per month but woteva)
- My very hyperbolic point was that most of us don’t subscribe to just one service. Pretty easy to subscribe to multiple of these and others like cloud backup services, car navigation, and other media like maybe even a news service. That’s a lot of subscriptions, and companies are trying to find even more ways to make us pay subscriptions. Everything from having to pay subscriptions to have parts of your car work to computer games. My point was a sarcastic take on how much we are being forced to subscribe to if we want to participate in what constitutes “normal” things these days.
  Edit: appropriately just dropped into my feed: https://lemmy.world/post/11140824 https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/13005167

Cups of coffee money is what donations for FOSS devs is for.

Yes, a cup of coffee every 5 minutes

Tfw I paid for a subscription to access my textbook this semester.

Granted, it's not just a textbook. My Spanish classes use VHL Central, which includes a textbook with videos, audio files, virtually endless practice assignments, and pretty much all of our assignments and course material.

It's a really great tool, I guess I just wish I could keep access to it after I graduated. (I think you can purchase a textbook, but definitely not the full program.) Ah, well. ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

The only thing I pay for is Crunchyroll. As for me it's worth it as I get tons of stuff the watch for £5 a month and it's also pretty easy to rip anything exclusive. And then I don't feel like I'm giving nothing back to Japan when I pirate anything they don't have I want.

I also pay for a VPS, but I'd say that's renting more then it is a subscription.

I only have Netflix, and it's included with my t mobile.

I guess I also have amazon prime, but I just use it for the free shipping and it gets used a lot with the family.

The only sub I use is Spotify. I share it across my friends and family and like their vast catalog. They also don't charge for their API so I can integrate it with Home Assistant.

My friends and family agree downloading songs manually sucks.

Piracy is a service issue. I have no problems with subscriptions as long as the price and service outpace piracy.

If the price gets to a point it doesn't make sense, I go back to piracy.

Perhaps it 'tis a silly thing. But I just want to thank whoever did the art work for drawing the stick figure guy with the shotgun as being left handed and holding a left hand shotgun.

My mental status thanks you and as another member of the Bar Sinister, I also thank you.

Funnily enough I used this gun as an asset in a scratch game. I think it's more likely they found a picture of a gun from that angle and decided to draw the person like that afterwards, I'm not a gun owner though so I don't really know what I'm talking about😜.

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)

Fuckers wearing $2000 suits out here panhandling

good thing i dont drink coffee

Laughs in having my own Jellyfin media server and ad blockers for YouTube as well as using my server for file backups as well

laughs in 7 TB of media actively archived
just installed two 18TB drives, currently working on mirroring and swapping over to new drive sets. It's a pain because i have limited sata, and need to do hotswaps unless i want to take EVERYTHING down.
It's worth it though, wouldn't catch me saying otherwise.

How else are you going to get underwear?

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!"

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.
- 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
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.
- 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.

Fuck Dropbox for making extra space subscription-based

Subscription is taxes

I don’t mind Xbox Game Pass when there’s a deal on it for $1 but I make sure not to auto renew

See, game pass I’m cool with because it’s an up-front transparent deal that you are buying time to access this library, and the library also changes. There is no pretense of “buying a copy” or whatever.
It’s nice for modern games anyway. For classic stuff that I want to have access to forever, I alreadty have access to that stuff forever. It might stink for the kids who are playing their “classics” right now, though.

pats SSD full of MP3s

FLAC! Long live songs you can actually own! Long live open source audio format!
- That's why bandcamp is one of the few places I'll willingly spend money on digital media. DRM-free downloading in flac format? Yes please.

You guys are complaining about a subscription to apple and amazon ? go look how much a subscription to an Autodesk product costs ?

They aren't comparable. Autodesk is a business product, not for consumers. The product makes you money and the price for it is a business expense and tax deductible. While subscriptions to Spotify, Netflix, etc. aren't.
- No, it's more comparable. AutoDesk, same as Photoshop. You used to be able to purchase it outright (at great expense, sure). Now that's not even an option, you have to subscribe monthly.
  There was never a non-subscription version of Spotify.