less than a cup of coffee
cup of coffee is now $12
🤕
Well nintendo switch online is like $3.99 for a month or $20.00 for a year.
Cup of coffee here is $0.1203668386
who is downvoting this? 😂 maybe they live in a poor country, or maybe they’re making an obscure joke. Why would people go past this comment and be like “nope, fuck this person”
Maybe they just love Starbucks and don’t like that I quoted the “street” price instead of the Starbucks price.
– Which still comes out to be $8.4 for 2.
Yeah but isn’t Netflix like $24/mo for the modern tier?
I’ve totally lost track, tbh.
deleted by creator
mullvad dropped port forwarding a few months ago. AirVpn on the other side…
deleted by creator
Well somebody needs an open port, otherwise you ain’t downloading anything.
I agree with that. I was just clarifying that Mullvad no longer offers port forwarding.
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)
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
deleted by creator
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 definitely depends on which news outlet we’re talking about.
That’s counterintuitive, do you have a source for that?
EDIT: googling around, I don’t see any obvious answers.
“You will own nothing and you will be happy” - Some rich fuck
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
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
People keep pointing this out like it’s some kind of misinformation.
The Ubisoft executive is saying gamers need to get comfortable not owning their games before subscription services will take off.
The Ubisoft executive would also very much like subscription services to take off.
QED the Ubisoft executive is saying “I’d really like gamers to get used to idea of not owning their games so our subscription service can take off”.
It comes back to the same thing: Ubisoft is saying aloud what they want the future of gaming to be.
And please don’t tell me you’re giving them the benefit of the doubt, here.
The problem is people apparently haven’t figured out yet how to read what the CEO of a for-profit company means when they say shit publicly about their services. Learn to read between the lines.
There’s a mile of difference between saying “consumers need to get comfortable not owning their games” and “we want consumers to get comfortable not owning their games (but using subscription services instead)”.
The former statement is extremely arrogant. The latter is just obvious. And it’s reasonable even if you or I personally don’t want to get our games on a subscription model - millions of people get their music through Spotify and it suits them just fine even though other people don’t want that. So it’s a way of straw-manning the people pushing subscriptions so you can hate them.
Its wild the difference 5 words make for a headline
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.
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
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?
As I said, I didn’t read that one, but I feel like it did do something to you so probably yes.
…you believe the CEO feels entitled to gamers becoming OK with subscription models. What he actually feels is a hope that subscription models will take off
That sounds like a distinction without a difference to me.
Thanks, I just linked the first article I found assuming it would be enough to get the point across, did it say something incorrect?
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.
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.
deleted by creator
The HP guy said it out loud about their printers
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?
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
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
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.
I’m shocked they’re still legal.
There would be SUCH a revolt from authors if publishers tried to do something to legislate libraries away that I doubt any new books would be released for decades.
Oh no. Everyone knows The Party fears a revolt of academics and intellectuals more than anything. My man, they’re always the first ones to go.
“You can judge the degree of civilization by looking at who is imprisoned” / Dostojevskij
Who’s talking about imprisonment? I’m talking about another writer’s strike, leaving publishers with nothing to publish for months or years. With their margins already razor-thin, they have to know that they’d just be done if they tried any funny business.
Give them time
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 itI 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
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
If somebody doesn’t shop at Costco enough to justify the executive membership, I’m not sure the regular membership would be justified either.
That’s kind of what we were thinking, too, which is why we went with it. We are a family of six, which means that we’re always going to buy big quantities of stuff somewhere; might as well be at Costco.
But you could get so many hotdogs!!??!!
Actually I understand you can get the Hot Dogs without the membership. Which also blows my mind. Thry should just compete with Weinerschnitzel.
I’ll pay you 3 quid a month for read access to your server.
Ha just kidding, fuck subscriptions
Sorry but I fucking lost it at it your justification for Warcraft. And that’s from somebody who’s been playing it on and off since mid-lich King
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.
deleted by creator
I use jellyfin without paying for a domain…?
I stream my Plex server to my parents and inlaws so local and wireguard only isn’t feasible
How else are you going to get underwear?
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.
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.
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
Prime Video is changing at the end of this month. Ads or you can pay $3/mo.
I’m actually just canceling instead.
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.
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.
