61–70 of 329 posts
It just means that you don't own the software that you run. Always having to have an account and sign in and pay the subscription tax otherwise you lose access to it. Now with games becoming digital, if you break their 'terms of service' they can lock and ban your account; taking your 'digital' games away or even locking the console. (Unless you paid for the physical version.)
This sort of began when we all got the impression that software should be free, or that we pay a low price once and get indefinite free upgrades. Given that developers need to be paid, and resources cost money, there needs to be a way to rectify that gap between the consumer and maintainer. At one point we did so by paying for an initial version of software, and then paying for updates. Now that we don’t do that, but…
Blame the victim?
We din't get any impression, as we don't set the prices. The companies set those prices.
For example Adobe customers never got or set any impression that "software should be free/low price". They paid 100s to 1000s of dollars for each update or package respectively, and they still got the mandatory subscription (and were some of the first users to be hit with one).
>How do you achieve super cheap products made by people making super high pay? Money doesn’t just materialize out of thin air to make that work.
We don't want "super cheap products", we want reasonably priced products we own after we buy.
I don't think this is fundamentally about subscriptions. They're a different business model, but there are positives too: for example they align what users pay far more closely with the value they get from a product. If you use a tool for one month, you pay a small amount, if you use it every month for years you pay more. In the old world, if you wanted to use purchase-once software just once, then you had to pay far…
- The same mechanism to subscribe must also be available to unsubscribe
- Automatic billing is not assumed and must be opt-in, perhaps renewed occasionally
- If a user does not use your service for the billing period you cannot charge them for itAre you old enough to have had a chance to use your eyes and look and see what's happened to computer games over the past twenty years? Things went from shareware and honest games to essentially NFT or addiction scams. There are good indie games here and there, but it's rare.
What's happened to games is happening to most other parts of software. There are exceptions of course, but they're rare at scale. If you don't want to pay for exploitative software don't use it. Find an open source alternative or an honest software broker. I know it sucks because what used to be a fair deal has turned sour, but accept that not only has the relationship has changed, but the landscape has too. The psychopaths read "data is the new oil"[1] and did an "orly?" and now they're here addicting grandmothers into squashing candy.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNDBo3spnwg
[1] https://twitter.com/theeconomist/status/860135249552003073
Seems to me that there is an inherent contradiction at the heart of SAAS. A service either: - Has a big enough moat that its immune to competition - in which case you get rent seeking behaviour; or - It's vulnerable and could disappear / become economically unviable so you wouldn't want to have your business rely on it. So you essentially have to choose between two unpalatable choices.
This sort of began when we all got the impression that software should be free, or that we pay a low price once and get indefinite free upgrades. Given that developers need to be paid, and resources cost money, there needs to be a way to rectify that gap between the consumer and maintainer. At one point we did so by paying for an initial version of software, and then paying for updates. Now that we don’t do that, but…
> This sort of began when we all got the impression that software should be free, or that we pay a low price once and get indefinite free upgrades. Blame the victim? We din't get any impression, as we don't set the prices. The companies set those prices. For example Adobe customers never got or set any impression that "software should be free/low price". They paid 100s to 1000s of dollars for each update or package r…
Subscriptions may make more sense as B2B software where the needs change over time, businesses tend to like having a two-way conversation more and a well-defined bill at the end of each year isn't necessarily a bad thing. As a private consumer though, selling a subscription is a surefire way to make me say no -- I'm not doing it.
This sort of began when we all got the impression that software should be free, or that we pay a low price once and get indefinite free upgrades. Given that developers need to be paid, and resources cost money, there needs to be a way to rectify that gap between the consumer and maintainer. At one point we did so by paying for an initial version of software, and then paying for updates. Now that we don’t do that, but…
> or that we pay a low price once and get indefinite free upgrades. To take IntelliJ as an example, I can't think of an improvement since 2018 that I really would pay for. Largely enabling that is why they moved to the subscription process because people like me would use IntelliJ 18 for five or so years then update for OS support or whatever. €100/yr is way more than I used to pay for intelliJ, €240/yr is way more t…
https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...