While that’s a nice sentiment that I agree with, you need to remember that those low paying jobs illegal immigrants often take, still pay far more than they could ever hope to make back home. Add to the low to nonexistent job skills and language issues, they start from far, far behind the eightball.
Having worked with large number of illegals back in the day, I found the vast majority to be quite genuinely nice people and co-workers. And they were some of the hardest workin’ sumbitches you would ever be around.
What I found interesting was the friction between the second and younger generations of Tex/Mex families and the newly arrived Mexicans, (I use Mexican to denote the actual country of origin here - sad that I need to do so). The first generation immigrants were very religious and conservative. While the second generations often adopted the more liberal attitudes of the locals. It caused a lot of ill undercurrents between the two groups.
ok, but we can’t just let people be underpaid because it’s more than people make in, and excuse me for using this term, third world shithole that barely has water infrastructure (I’m looking at you Serbia).
Sadly, it’s a chicken and egg situation. You can’t get a better job because you have no skills employers will pay more for. And you can’t very easily find a way to get those skills because you would get deported because you are somewhere illegally.
It makes for a complicated problem to solve. And I don’t have an answer other than to say that it’s on the first generation to make it so the following generations climb the ladder upwards.
With piracy mindset, i got an idea, with hacked ps5 and their subscription, you can rip games from their service with hen, download once, then activate hen and rip with ftp, that’s it, if Xbox were hacked then gamepass, ea+, ubisoft subscription, could be ripped in seconds just like that
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
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.
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?
…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.
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.
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?
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
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.
Ubisoft seems like one of the shittiest game companies. They were one of the earliest companies that implemented Always-on DRM, requiring an app to open chests, trying to put ads when you paused the game, refusing to put games on Steam because they want more money, sexual assault/harassment allegations etc.
It was some special kind of exclusive bonus chest thingy, it wasn’t as bad as he points it, it was like a bonus thingy you could ignore them. I honestly didn’t care for it at all.
I think it was similar to the mini game ships thing on Black Flag, but on your phone and sending assassins instead of ships and maybe solving some puzzles, can’t remember.
It made more sense as a phone app, because it was like on Black Flag you sent stuff and that would take x time and then you would get the results, so in a phone you would easily check the progress and maybe get a notification, instead of having to enter the game to check just that.
EDIT: It seems Black Flag also used an app, I played later and now it’s a thing in-game I guessed that was the original version honestly.
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)/¯
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.
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.
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.
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 mehacorps 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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
lolll yes. i don’t know though it’s still a valid question. but i have to say, reading the novels, i didn’t really question it. however once i saw the films, i couldn’t help questioning it.
Apparently a internet web series named Battle for Dream Island suffered from this right around the second half of its fourth season. Let’s just say that this is when it has hit its lowest point ever.
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 :-)
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.
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.
The songs you listen to when you are listening on random are often ads. Record companies will do “pay for placement” deals to get songs and artists they promote out there.
They used to call it payola when it was on the radio and it was illegal.
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