Tbh, the worst part is when you pay for it and still get ads anyway. Feels like double dipping, but it’s obviously going to happen because wall street doesn’t like when line only goes up a little.
Yeah that’s totally galling. Shrinkflation for online services.
You know some shiny-suited corporate asshole got a huge bonus for coming up with that though.
Enshrinklification of the internet
Welcome to cable TV in the late 80s…
Yeah it’s crazy. We have TV plan with some 100 channels bundled up with internet, and sometimes rarely when I watch TV I’m just baffled by the fact a paid service still is full of ads
Given my entertainment options, I found a small developer that sells an app for a couple bucks that allows me to pull streams through my phone and transcode it and chromecast it to my projector. Juijitsu Kaisen never looked so good.
The price of playing skyrim for every minute of my life until I die
With game pass: Over $9000.00
Just buying the game: $59.99
59,99 on every platform the game gets released on because Todd won’t stop
Me but with Factorio and even more hours
2000 hours gang, where y’all at?
I don’t hate subscription based services if they’re priced fairly and make sense.
Paying monthly for a service that then starts giving you less, adds more premium plans, introduces ads, etc. is garbage.
Paying for a game, then having to pay a monthly fee to play (WoW, for example), is garbage.
Paying for software, but then having to pay monthly to use the software, is garbage.
Paying for software, but then having to pay monthly to be allowed to contact support (Blue Iris), is garbage.
But paying for things like Spotify, where you get access to pretty much all songs as they release, have no limit on how much you listen to, and it has a fair student pricing or family pricing, that’s fine. Way better than paying per song.
I mean shit, if I paid for every song I have in my library on Spotify, I’d owe $1430. My Spotify is $17 per month, spit between 4 people, so I pay $4.25. I can either pay for every song in my library and not add any more, or pay for Spotify for 28 years and continue growing my library…
Spotify is the only subscription I still pay for. That’s it. Everything else is whack
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eh… nintendo online isn’t as shitty as the others
Nintendo online is even more shitty than the others. We still have zero games with dedicated servers splatoon smash none of them have dedicated servers which is the whole point in why they needed to charge a fee. You might like having the old games on the emulator for the monthly fee and that would be fine but there’s no reason to charge for matchmaking. Matchmaking and leaderboard should be free it might cost like 5 to 10 cents per year per user and they make way more than that with the 30 to 50% licensing fee for each game. To make the Nintendo one even worse third parties still have to pay for online services even though Nintendo also charges the customer. So if you buy a game that wants to use matchmaking or leaderboards they have to pay Nintendo additional fees for you to use them even though the customer you’re all so paying the fee for the same service
Who buys his kids products from Apple or Nintendo is most likely also torturing cute cats in his basement. And enjoys it.
If it’s free, you’re the product
We used to pay a one time fee for software and we paid for big updates. I miss those days
Unless you pirate.
Or buy it in a one time payment.
In fact, you’re pretty much the product in every one of these examples, even if you pay
You know, what you can not find on EBay you can find on PBay. Or whatever warez site you prefer.
Mandatory “don’t use piratebay” comment
I haven’t been into the pirating scene for a few years, last time I was active pirate bay was the best. why not use it anymore?
I say the time of Torents is OVER. Today Streaming-Warez-Sites are the Kick.
I wouldn’t use a pirate streaming site over torrenting even if I was getting paid to do so lol the releases generally have terrible bitrates and low picture quality, likely because they’re the smallest files the site uploaders could find. They’re convenient if you can’t afford a VPN and don’t care about file quality when it comes to movies and shows, but I prefer being able to select a high quality file with good encoding, quality compression (265, AV1), and known high quality uploaders, like UTR and QxR. That’s only possible through torrenting the file or getting it through Usenet.
Nope
Those Times where Warez-Streaming-Sites had low quality are long gone. While 4k=3840 releases are rare, we have mostly 1920 nowadays with some 1280 in-between, often Bluray- or Streaming-Rips without re-encoding, at least if the source was H264/H265. Older MPEG2/4 though is still often recoded. You can easily re-encode an old MPEG2-Bluray from 20Gig to H265 4Gig without visibly loss. With more modern Codecs the Data is usually “re-containered” which means the Content itself isn’t changed, only the Encryption and Container are changed.
Overall Streamingz-Sites are pretty good nowadays, Amazon and Netflix take up to one minute to switch to high Bitrate quality for me. With Warez-Sites you have to wait 3-5 seconds but then it immediately starts at Max Quality and NEVER at lower quality. And their Search actually works great and is well organized and everything reacts so much faster because they reduce the eye candy. They also often have bookmarks - which don’t work as good as commercial providers but good enough.
I can only have access to Amazon, Netflix, Joyn and Public Television Media Centres so for other providers your mileage may vary.
Meh. I still prefer Stremio and my custom configured Jackett setup for searching for torrents. Just has more features and more control. I’ve never encountered a pirate streaming site with even half the features Stremio has. I will grant you that anime streaming sites have gotten a lot better over the years, but I still don’t trust general pirate streaming sites. It’s great to hear they got better though. Easier acess to media is always a good thing.
Torrents of all kinds can be easily tracked and its users be sued because they do not only consume but also distribute.
One-Click-Hosters and Streamingz-Sites on the other side are hard to track and their users don’t distribute.
At least by German Law it is mostly “we only care about distribution, not consumption”. The later has an estimated damage of $1 per case, that is not even petty crime. Distribution on the other hand often is handled at $1000/case… I think there was not a single case of a Streamingz-User being prosecuted but already millions of Torrent-Users.
