• IWantToFuckSpez@kbin.social
        39·
        5 months ago

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

      • JJROKCZ@lemmy.world
        14·
        5 months ago

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

      • leave_it_blank@lemmy.world
        5·
        5 months ago

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

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

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

          • Sanctus@lemmy.worldEnglish
            01·
            5 months ago

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

            • FishFace@lemmy.world
              1·
              5 months ago

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

            • WillBalls@lemmy.world
              1·
              5 months ago

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

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

    • sbv@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      5·
      5 months ago

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

      • JJROKCZ@lemmy.world
        3·
        5 months ago

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

  • MrSilkworm@lemmy.world
    77·
    5 months ago

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

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

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

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

    Edit: syntax

    • lseif@sopuli.xyz
      7·
      5 months ago

      a subscription to a service X is O(n), where n is for how long you keep that service.

      instead purchasing the content provided by X individually, is O(m), where m is how much content you buy.

      if in one subscription term, you would spend more purchasing individual content than one subscription fee to X, it is financially more efficient to use X.

      however, this assumes you will only consume a piece of content once, and dont care about having a physical/true copy of it.

      a O(1) scenario would be like a lifetime subscription to X.

      ps: i am fully on the side of owning media, and i have no idea if this comment is actually true, it just sounds smart :-)

  • SomeGuy69@lemmy.world
    437·
    5 months ago

    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.

    • BynaD@lemm.ee
      165·
      5 months ago

      I prefer paying for services with my money insead of with my data, but I can see both sides.🤷

      • blind3rdeye@lemm.ee
        15·
        5 months ago

        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.

        • BynaD@lemm.ee
          2·
          5 months ago

          Thats true, and as it is, its impossible to be completely rid of data harvesting services. I made the switch to proton to get out of googles mail, drive and photo solutions, the have a vpn included aswell. but yeah, I would never trust Google, Microsoft, meta or any of those to not collect data, no matter what they promise.

      • haui@lemmy.giftedmc.com
        14·
        5 months ago

        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.

      • baseless_discourse@mander.xyz
        10·
        5 months ago

        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 they do need a subscription based model as they need to rent their servers.

    • Kepabar@startrek.website
      7·
      5 months ago

      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.

      • melooone@feddit.de
        41·
        5 months ago

        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.

    • YIj54yALOJxEsY20eU@lemm.ee
      21·
      5 months ago

      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.

  • sbv@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    342·
    5 months ago

    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.

    • skizzles@lemmy.ml
      91·
      5 months ago

      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.

    • JJROKCZ@lemmy.world
      31·
      5 months ago

      I agree that ongoing infrastructure costs money, but several years of that should be included in the original estimate and pricing for the sale of the product. Plan for the sale price being cost to make+5 years of estimated maintenance for base product+profit margin. Then extend maintenance with each DLC if any. If no dlc then offer subscription to pay for servers and other infrastructure, if subscriptions fail to cover that then sunset the product but open source the server infrastructure so the community can pay to run it if desired.

  • NielsBohron@lemmy.worldEnglish
    257·
    5 months ago

    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.

    • thisisnotgoingwell@programming.dev
      141·
      5 months ago

      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

      • Phil_in_here@lemmy.ca
        167·
        5 months ago

        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.

        • thisisnotgoingwell@programming.dev
          42·
          5 months ago

          Not really. It’s noticeable over Bluetooth as well, if your device supports codecs with a high enough bitrate. Obviously Bluetooth is still lossy, but listening experience is way better. The headphones I’m wearing now use aptxHD, with a bitrate of 576kbps. Spotify only offers AAC, with a bitrate of 256kbps.

          As far as who can appreciate the difference, I guess? But you don’t need to be a concert pianist to appreciate audio. That said, I play many instruments, so maybe I’m biased.

            • thisisnotgoingwell@programming.dev
              1·
              5 months ago

              I’m not going to argue conjecture. I have over $10,000 in audio equipment and like I already said I play many instruments, so you’re not even picking someone good to make generalizations about. Bluetooth codecs are always going to be subpar, but they’re probably how most people listen to streaming services most of the time. Anything that is streaming from a PC except Bluetooth is a notable difference.

              I just checked the headphones I’m wearing again, they’re actually using aptx lossless with a bitrate of 1200kbps. The point is that Deezer offers the same services for less money and higher quality audio streaming.

              Apparently, when Spotify does roll out hifi, it will probably be a higher paid tier. Until then, for me, Deezer is the far superior service.

      • NielsBohron@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        5 months ago

        That’s a good tip; I hadn’t heard of that one yet. Is their library as comprehensive as Spotify?

      • GladiusB@lemmy.world
        32·
        5 months ago

        Plex tanked right as I was watching a movie last week. It’s an alternative, but not reliable.

    • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      5 months ago

      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.

    • teejay@lemmy.worldEnglish
      51·
      5 months ago

      Pandora is cheaper than Spotify and arguably better at picking new and random content based on your input. But it won’t play specific songs that you request like Spotify does. And Pandora works via Bluetooth, car apps, etc.

      • NielsBohron@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        5 months ago

        I used Pandora a ton a decade ago when there weren’t really any mainstream streaming services to compete with. But as someone who listens to albums and makes my own playlists, Pandora won’t cut it for me. I’m enough of a music snob that when I say I want to listen to The Stones, I want to listen to Let It Bleed front to back.

        For some applications, Pandora is great, but it’s not what I need.

      • SacralPlexus@lemmy.world
        4·
        5 months ago

        I loved and used Pandora for a long time. It was really good at recommending songs. I quit when they started playing ads in my feed despite paying for an ad free experience. These were like voice ads for concerts or similar from artists. I contacted customer support and the response was basically “we don’t think those are ads, they are ‘special messages’ from the artists so they aren’t going to stop.”

        The problem is that I mostly use music streaming as background at work. Having a 30 second clip of some guy’s voice saying “Hey I’m Bobby from the Bobbles and we are excited to be touring in your area next month! Come check out our show for a Bobbling-Good-Time!” is very disruptive in the same way an ad for anything else is. They were clear that they weren’t going to stop so I walked away.

      • NielsBohron@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        5 months ago

        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

    • ReplicantBatty@lemmy.one
      31·
      5 months ago

      Agreed Spotify is totally worth it. I use it a lot to go on like rabbit-hole deep dives into some artist or genre or something, I use it a lot for stuff I will listen once and never again. That would be completely impossible if I was buying individual songs or albums or whatever. Paying for a nearly infinite database of music I can peruse at will following whatever random interests I have that day, that is absolutely worth the subscription fee.

    • ji17br@lemmy.ml
      2·
      5 months ago

      Apple Music pays out 2-3X more than Spotify to artists if that is something you are concerned about.

      • spiderman@ani.socialEnglish
        1·
        5 months ago

        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.

    • zeekaran@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      1·
      5 months ago

      I only play music in my car that is on my phone. I can fit my entire music library on my phone.

  • Blass Rose@pawb.social
    181·
    5 months ago

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

    Then the

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

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

    • onion@feddit.de
      1·
      5 months ago

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

  • kase@lemmy.world
    17·
    5 months ago

    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⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

    • Spedwell@lemmy.world
      9·
      5 months ago

      That kind of model is unfortunately common for university courses. I had it for my language courses, and a couple of the core maths courses.

      The online platform justifies a subscription by providing additional resources, homework grading, etc. Fair enough, honestly, if they want to charge you $15 or something reasonable. But when textbook access gets rolled into the bundle, it tends to inflate the subscription cost and also have the convenient-for-the-publisher side effect of temporary access to the text. Lose-lose, from a student perspective.

      I had a course that required we buy a license to Pearson’s service in order to submit homework. $100+ to view a pdf for a semester and submit homework through a buggy form interface. I still hold a grudge against everyone in the department for that decision.

    • erasebegin@lemmy.world
      34·
      5 months ago

      With that model the company can afford to offer far more content than with a pay-once model. With a pay-once model they only generate enough income to be able to offer a book, and maybe a smattering of supplementary material. Go subscription-based however, revenue increases, so output increases and now they can afford to create and maintain a whole lot more while keeping the price affordable to those who need it during the period that they need it.

      It’s a similar principle to renting vs buying. If they were to offer all of those materials as a one-off purchase at a price that would allow their business to be sustainable, it would cost more than most are able to afford.

      If we go back to one-off purchases, we go back to getting less for life as opposed to a lot for a limited period of time. It’s a trade off, and clearly one that most people are willing to make.

      People get so angry (OP) about the way things are just because they’re unhappy in general and looking for something to blame. Not all companies are fair with their subscription models, but most are. Not every company cares about their customers, but most do. Some companies are run by sociopaths, but most are run by normal, nice people.

    • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      10·
      5 months ago

      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.

      • SendMePhotos@lemmy.world
        3·
        5 months ago

        How… Uh… Would one get some of your media files…? Do we do like in the old days and do USB drop off sites mixed with geocaching?

        • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          1·
          5 months ago

          Know me IRL. One of these days i do intend on properly preserving a lot of the content i host somewhere, that’s going to be an ordeal though. Most of it is YT content currently, considering it’s mostly what i consume that shouldn’t be a huge shocker.

          Really though, if anything, just start your own archive and keep building it. Tailor it to your personal tastes and worry about it from there.

    • marx2k@lemmy.world
      4·
      5 months ago

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

        • GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip
          4·
          5 months ago

          My YouTube algorithm is just terrible. It will circle back the same 5-10 videos I have watched or liked some years ago, sprinkle in some rightwing political bullshit, or show only very tangentially related results.

          Recent example: an underground artist popped into my head I used to listen to during my school days, and I wanted to go through their album for nostalgia.

          Entering the artist and album name gives me two tracks from that album, a handful of other artists who have at some point collaborated, and the aforementioned unrelated or political results. Clicking through some of the videos always cycles back to the same few suggestions.

          I even tried this on incognito mode to see if my login bricked the algorithm, but it was equally shitty. Apparently google can’t even get their own content indexed properly, not to mention actual web search.

          • THCDenton@lemmy.world
            2·
            5 months ago

            The trick for me is to search playlists. But it might be a region issue depending on where you live

        • Jorgelino@lemmy.ml
          2·
          5 months ago

          On mobile i’ve got an app that lets me play youtube videos with the screen locked so i use that as well.

          It’s a bit annoying cause the app does have ads as well, but only when you open it. If you put a video on and close it (leaving it playing on the background), there’s no ads

      • baseless_discourse@mander.xyz
        1·
        5 months ago

        bandcamp is pretty great. Granted, they are still a for-profit company; a popular community based solution would be nice. But they do let you download lossless file to self-host or just listen on device.

        The only complain is the lack of classical music (not modern/contemporary classical) on there. But I would imagine most classical music is public domain by now. I just don’t know where to find them…

        Edit: found it: https://www.classiccat.net/ or internet archive has a huge collection of classical music.

      • Klaymore@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        5 months ago

        yt-dlp to download, Strawberry and JetAudio as music players, and Kid3qt for batch renames/metadata management