godsammitdam @ godsammitdam @lemmy.zip

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2 mo. ago

Sounds like a great time for that age verification/face scanning/id scanning, right? Right?

I hear the bankruptcy and the flood, genuinely, that's a rough year and I'm not here to pile onto that.

But I'd push back gently on "this is just what works for me right now." I've been through a fire myself. Entertainment wasn't the priority either, but I still consumed it, through what I already owned and what was free. There are thousands of free titles out there, plus whatever's already sitting in that flood-surviving collection. None of that requires a subscription to a company that's actively part of the problem we're talking about.

The critique was never about judging someone for being broke. It's about where the money goes when there's a free or already-owned alternative available. One subscription is like one vote, it won't single-handedly move Sony, but in aggregate that's exactly the mechanism that got us here. You don't have to be the parasite class to still be feeding it, even on a tight budget.

They did exactly that already actually when they brought up cars and housing.

Generational wealth through ownership.

They, themselves say they have a collection of the past they'll cherish. But should anyone else want to collect something like that, oh no, it's worthless when they're dead, so you shouldn't have the ability to own it like I do.

Literally pulling the ladder up after they benefitted. Just like on housing. On vehicles. Now on games.

Let's actually look at the economics here instead of just the sticker price. I'm responding to both your original comment and this current one because they're both wild, and how you switch positions so flippantly really shows us a lot, that you have no ideology and as the other user said "fuck you, got mine" is EXACTLY what you're preaching. It's actually ironic you talk about generational wealth while defending your own headstart. But let's break it down.

If it wasn't profitable, these companies wouldn't be pushing subscriptions this hard. That's the whole tell. Companies don't run at a loss for your convenience. The subscription model exists because the math works in their favor, not yours, and it works specifically because the best customer is the one who forgets they're paying. Gym memberships have run on that principle for decades. Now we're doing it with games, with compute, with groceries on payment plans. Lower upfront cost does not mean cheaper. It means the cost gets spread out and obscured long enough that you stop noticing it.

And the trajectory matters more than this year's price. PS Plus has gone up twice in three years. The console itself just had a price hike. Sony's not raising prices because they're struggling, they're raising them because they can, and because hardware ownership is exactly what they're trying to phase out. Jeff Bezos said it outright back in 2024: "You're going to buy compute off the grid. That's AWS." He's not talking about convenience. He's talking about renting your PC. That's the actual stated direction of the industry from the people running it, from the parasite class looking to exploit you, and let's be honest, gaming is often targeted first and operates as a microcosm for society at large in many ways.

Sometimes it's fine to not have access to everything all at once. Sometimes it's fine to save up, buy the one game you actually want, and have more of that money go to the people who made it instead of the platform gatekeeping access to it. And sometimes it's fine to replay something you already own instead of needing a constant firehose of new content. A lot of older games actually said something. A lot of new AAA releases exist purely to funnel you into a storefront for DLC, card packs, battle passes, XP boosters. You're not paying a subscription to play a game at that point, you're paying for the privilege of being marketed to inside it. At some point it's worth asking if you're enjoying the time you're spending or just chasing the dopamine hit of a loot box animation for pixels you don't own and never will.

This isn't hypothetical. Look at what just happened with Halo Campaign Evolved. Local split screen co-op, same couch, same hardware, two controllers, originally required a PlayStation Plus subscription per player just to play the campaign. A mode that should be fully offline. It got walked back after backlash, but the backlash is the only reason it got walked back. Nothing about the initial announcement suggests anyone internally saw a problem until the public did. And even after the correction, both players still need online accounts to play split screen locally. The frictionless drop in drop out couch co-op that existed for decades is already gone. The paid version was just the test balloon to see how far they could push it. Test the extreme version, walk it back partially when people get angry, keep the version that's still worse than what existed before, call it progress. Pushing the envelope, as the parasite class always has. Just how much are you willing to spend before it's too much? The DMCA fight over things like Slopsmith runs the same mechanism from a different angle. You buy a song file, you own that file, and the law still lets a company nuke an open source project for letting you access content you already paid for, because access was always the thing they wanted to control, not piracy.

Now, on "I could really care less if I own these games, I have my collection of the past": that's the part worth sitting with. Because when it got pointed out that this attitude is basically fuck you got mine for everyone who didn't get in early enough or can't afford inflated collectible prices, the response was to flip to nihilism. Suddenly none of it matters anyway because once you're dead whoever inherits it will just sell it for nothing. That's not a rebuttal, that's being a spineless coward. You can't simultaneously say you'll cherish your collection and that it's worthless the moment you stop being the one holding it. Pick one.

And the comparison to being blamed for your parents buying a house for 10k isn't what anyone said. Nobody's invalidating your opinion because of when you were born. The point is that you had decades to build a library while ownership was still the default, you're not buying much new anymore because you already have that backlog, and you're fine with a model that denies that same option to everyone coming up now who doesn't have your head start. That's not about your age. That's about being comfortable with a door closing behind you that you already walked through. You're happy to pull the ladder up so no one else can enjoy the benefits. Just like housing. Just like car ownership.

None of this works without people continuing to pay for it. Every subscription dollar is a vote for this being the permanent shape of the industry, and right now it's an industry that's making sure the next generation never gets the option you already used. And you're happy to pull that ladder up. You're smiling as you literally tell us "fuck you, got mine."

So yeah. Fuck you too.

We should have a 20 hour workweek, the same pay, and hire more people and train them. More time to be human.

Capitalism isn't built for that. It's built to burn you dry so someone else lives in luxury because they already had a bunch of capital and want to make more.

It's on purpose. The longer you scroll, the longer you're on the platform. That's higher engagement numbers and is used to expose you to/negotiate higher prices from advertisements.

Stuff made open source/without a profit motive.

If there's a profit motive, it's not looking to solve a problem or make things better. It's looking to make profit.

Americans hit with record high everything due to capitalism and fascism.

That's right. COD and Madden blur together for me. EA and ABK are just conglomerates of corporate greed after all.

Have you seen the state of older COD games on steam? Hacks that crash your pc, add malware, etc just by walking by a person, crazy stuff.

Activision seems to be doing just fine.

But yes, let's burn books, movie reels, records, etc because they might offend someone somewhere.

Games (and software) are one of the few forms of media and free speech that are subject to this.

Hence why streaming, e-books, etc come in to push in convenience while removing ownership/independence.

I see it tangentially related in how it operates similar to fossil fuels/renewables. The industry wants you to keep buying. They can't control the sun, wind, etc, so you don't need to rely on them.

Same kinda thing here, they want you to rely on them and keep buying the newest thing. And if they delete your old version, welp, guess you better come get the new one (especially when they "remaster" it with 0 effort and slap it on a new digital storefront.)

I just hate the profit motive lol

Looking at you sports and COD gamers 👀

To help:

https://zenodo.org/records/8161056

https://delistedgames.com/resources-to-help-you-keep-up-with-delistings-and-shutdowns/

Being owned by fascist billionaires and your survival being dependent on a paycheck unfortunately does that to people. Especially with decades and decades of propaganda focusing on individualism and dismantling education.

We wouldn't be here right now and/or there would've been a general strike already if there were any real worker protections and social safety nets.

Tell that to LovableSidekick 🙃

Meanwhile, instead, give up your privacy for age verification.

Instead of a safe, which requires parents to be accountable, why not have routine in home government inspections? It's to protect the children.

(Also, yes, no guns would do it, just drawing a parallel here in our stupid governments oppressing us)

That's called being a rapist everybody.

Elon, you're an idiot.

But go on, protect your own comfort by hiding scores rather than facing criticism head on. That's real confidence in your ideology.

Elitism has never, and will never, be applied fairly. Hierarchies create fascism. "Capability" is never assesed neutrally, it's assessed by existing power structures and by those in power who look and think similarly. Hence, bigotry, hence fascism, hence authoritarianism. If you believe we live in a meritocracy right now you're either a billionaire, politician, or just a useful idiot.

Your ideology literally disgusts me.

No, that's my own fault for copying and pasting the previous comment to rewrite the latter half and not editing the top half.

In all honesty, I was sitting on a roof taking a break while installing solar panels. That's my bad.

Is the jaw dropping sum including deporting the Trump family and the administration and the republican party and establishment democrats to Iran?