This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Turns out saddling a generation with debt, and then telling them the AI is gonna take all the jobs doesn't do a lot for moral, or our finances.
Nevermind that there's a middle East forever war 2.0 going on that's jacking up the cost of everything right now.
Guys, learn to pirate. If you stick to media and familiarize yourself with filetypes (also enable file extensions, windows users. Chaps my ass that they're hidden by default) then you'll be fine. Nicotine+ for music, qbittorrent+jackett for movies/tv, or the *arr stack if you're fancy, or Usenet if you're paying for it.
seriously, signing back up just for a titlle won't make them change. It will just lead to them releasing weekly and adding more ads and all that so you have to stay longer and get a worse experience. I don't have a single amazon product but I'm still caught up on The Boys. It's not that hard and you will save so much money.
Streamering platforms broke the piracy truce first. You don't owe them anything.
Well I'm going to be honest I don't think I know of anyone who actually pays for such stuff. At least for streaming. All my friends just pirate and have always been doing it.
I think the screwup started when companies stopped rewarding loyalty and instead aimed for capitalizing on laziness and lockin, giving the discounts up front to attract subscribers in the hopes of keeping them in a more expensive subscription afterwards.
I think the streaming sites could turn it around by instead offering a discounted rate after you've been subscribing for x months.
One issue with video games now is that there are so many and they all take so much time to play now. And since companies push out games so quickly there's no point buying anything before they push out a patch to fix all the bugs in the initial release, might as well use that time to play some of the games I already have and then pick up what I want on sale.
I'll happily pay full price for a short, creative indie game, but that's already probably much cheaper than a big budget game anyways
I'm over 50 and I sail the high seas. I can afford all the streaming services and even used to pay for them... until the price hikes and now the ads, so fuck them. I also never pay full price for my games.
All that money now goes to paying artists on BandCamp and a few Patreon accounts that make me happy.
I'm in my late 30's and went back to the high seas. I used to sail the seas in my early 20's when i was broke AF and didn't have cable TV. When Netflix came around it sudden became easier and more convenient to just pay $6.99/ month to watch whatever I wanted. For years I got by with Spotify and Netflix and I didn't even look back. Then, all of a sudden there were more streaming services than i knew what to do with and every few months they would all raise their price and reduce their libraries. Then they started putting ads in. Now I'm self hosting all of my media and using Stremio/Torentio for my one off TV shows and movies. I directly support creators wherever I can as well, whether it's Patreon or Kofi or just buying their Merch.
how far things have fallen. I remember 15 years ago, I actually reached out to Netflix directly to tell them how great they were as a product. I was like 17 and stupid. I reached out to their help desk just to say "hey you guys are awesome!" how times change I guess. Yoho and all that.
I'm 52, I don't pay full price for games.
I'm 38. I never pay full price for a game lol.
wHy Do MiLlEnNiAlS hAtE tHe EcOnOmY
Hey now, be specific. Millennials hate the shadow economy that is debt exchange and the stock market. You know... the rich man’s economy.
Won’t Purchase Full-Price Video Games, New Study Finds
The only game I've ever seen sold at full price on a consistent basis was Factorio. Every other publisher seems sold on putting $60-80 on the label and then floating 10-30% discounts as the sales cycle permits.
It's the Macy's model for sales. "You're getting a $20 discount on a $60 game" sells more titles than "Here's a game for $40".
100%
And good for them. They should be withholding their money given the enshittification. If anyone's interested, I've made a recent series of YT videos on this topic, and I use chapters, so if you're TLDW, I've got you there too.
It's not just gen z.
I am honestly surprised, paid video on demand even survived the post-Netflix fragmentation. YouTube is free. uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock make it usable. Illegal streaming sites exist and are trivial to use without any risk.
Why even consider paid video on demand services?
Examples of trivially easy streaming sites you mentioned? (Strictly for research purposes, of course.)
You need to bring your expectations of general society down dude. The majority ain't capable nor willing to actually learn with alot due to the deeply rooted "piracy bad" mentality capitalism has instilled in people.
those hacks are beyond technical capabilities of most people
Exactly ^
uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock
What percentage of YouTube users have either?
It must be tiny. And most are using the mobile app anyway.
On mobile I just run Vanced. UBlock and Sponsorblock are solely for my computers. Although I think a lot of people don't want to deal with Vanced and do indeed just use Firefox Mobile. I do recommend Vanced, though.
Better yet, Jellyfin on a self-hosted server that streams your media to instances.
Good luck getting most GenZ to even read two paragraphs about how to do this, much less attempt it.
You do realise server and take back control of your tech stuff is currently getting quite trendy on socials, right? A lot of GenZ are driving this too. I’m GenZ and most of my friends would love a small server or something, and the ones that aren’t convinced love my (janky) setup.
I run my media server on my gaming PC, you don't need anything special to do it. I haven't had any issues gaming online while streaming/downloading either.
The younger generations seem to have no concept of what hardware and software is needed, because most of the companies that sell that stuff are trying to maximize profits and vendor-lock in, which leads them to "teach" their customers bad information. It's the exact same reason why there are so many people who think they need 64gb or 128gb of ram in their gaming machine.
I wonder how prevalent sailing the high seas is in gen z.
tf you expected we're all broke. you're lucky some of us haven't heard of piracy yet (somehow)
Skill issue (sad gen Z noises)
I'm calling it now. Streaming services are going to continue to double-down on artificial scarcity for flagship shows until we 100% converge on cable. They're going to reinvent broadcast schedules after slow-drip weekly episode rollouts and half-seasons (you are here) don't get the results they want.
I was imagining they were eventually going to go bankrupt and consolidate, with their IP ending up in, like, the Disney or Warner vault. Cable has evolved too. I'm not selling here, just explaining. Your streaming service could get offered as part of a cable package or even part of your internet. SaaS is taking over so streaming might just become another part of some software package like a cable channel.
Only with Usenet.
I'm doing that and I'm not even short of money.
Just sick of nothing being available when I want it, on another app, and having to scan several services to confirm that.
With Jellyfin it's just there. There's no ads. There's no "oh hey you looked away from the credits for five seconds I'll just play something else".
