this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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[–] Gigan 148 points 9 months ago (8 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 68 points 9 months ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 47 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 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.

[–] FishFace 19 points 9 months ago (4 children)
[–] Daveyborn 13 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Its wild the difference 5 words make for a headline

[–] Sanctus 12 points 9 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] WillBalls 12 points 9 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

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[–] JJROKCZ 14 points 9 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

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[–] finestnothing 86 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (6 children)

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

[–] Tenthrow 58 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] ilinamorato 24 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

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

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[–] MrSilkworm 85 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 65 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Subscriptions are O(n)

One time purchases are O(1)

You want O(1)..

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[–] UnderpantsWeevil 52 points 9 months ago (6 children)

less than a cup of coffee

cup of coffee is now $12

🤕

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 9 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] SexyTimeSasquatch 24 points 9 months ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] SomeGuy69 38 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (5 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Piracy is wrong and immoral! You should never use mullvad or proton with port forwarding off to pirate things!

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 9 months ago

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

[–] NielsBohron 19 points 9 months ago (29 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (8 children)

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

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[–] Exusia 19 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yo ho/All hands/Hoist the colors high

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (6 children)

"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

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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!"

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] Kase 17 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago (1 children)

This is gong to sound nuts, but subscriptions aren't a problem for me, auto renewals are. I like to be in control of my finances, so whenever I sign up for something I pick a term I can live with, 1,3, 6 or 12 months, I pay, and I immediately go to the account management screen and cancel.

I don't care if it's inconvenient to have to think about it every so often, but I'm in control of the spending and to me that's what matters.

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[–] Thcdenton 15 points 9 months ago (16 children)

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

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[–] TankovayaDiviziya 15 points 9 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago (6 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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

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[–] ktowner15 14 points 9 months ago (2 children)
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[–] IHateFacelessPorn 14 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

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.

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[–] HexesofVexes 12 points 9 months ago

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

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

[–] Iron_Lynx 11 points 9 months ago

I like to apply some business logic to it.

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

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

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago

Yes, a cup of coffee every 5 minutes

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