DVDs at thrift stores for a buck. My collection is massive and still growing. My Steam backlog will outlive me.
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Proud subscriber of dropout tv and they 100% deserve it. Everything else I mooch off someone else lol. But tbh the majority of stuff I watch are on dropout or Apple TV tbh.
I mean, with the video games point, they're like... always on sale these days. The only time they're not on sale is when they first come out.
Buying the game on launch for full price + (usually) issues or buying it a year later, 60+% off, patched and with additional post-launch content? Tough choice!
And considering many games come out totally bugged today and need a few months to be fixed anyway makes the choice even harder.
Things get too expensive and people who don't have the extra cash will find a way to spend less, or not at all. Remember this, all of you shareholders, if you price the customers out of buying your product then you've only screwed yourselves and your greed is to blame. What is wrong with a standard, healthy 10% profit?
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'm 52, I don't pay full price for games.
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.
Shit, I'm 52 and fairly well off but I do this. There are so many overpriced things around these days. A lot of tech is really overestimating what it's worth.
The second to last time i bought DLC at launch was the assassins creed game in colonial america, which was a waste of money. Then Starfield came out and you could play it a weekend early if you bought DLC, another scam. It is so much more fun to buy an indy game in alpha and get an update every few months from someone isnt a whore for share holders.
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.
So... they're taking advantage of one of the selling-features of streaming services, that being the ability to scale your spend pending your own personal preferences. In the early days of streaming services, they had enough content to justify paying a monthly subscription each month -- it's not the customer's fault that streaming got enshitified. Hell, a bunch of them switching to 'weekly episodes' was just a very poorly disguised attempt to drag out how many months they thought their one flagship show could capture audiences. The old practice of dumping a whole season all at once in one month, because you knew you'd have another season of some other good show the next month, is practically gone -- with streaming reverting back to the old network practices they'd usurped.
Same with games. Tons of titles are just shitty early access things, things that get abandoned mid-development, things that rely on a live-service platform that companies'll shut down a month or two later, and so on. And some titles are askin like $80+ for their shitty offerings. Yeah, that's not the customers fault in the slightest. They're right to look for discounted offers, what sane person wouldn't?
They probably would do those things if they could afford to live comfortably and had a little extra disposable income but in today's world every time you turn around someone is screwing you out of money. There isn't anything left for fun stuff. Especially when the fun stuff company is doing some of the screwing lol
Looks like my gen X ass is just an gen Z in disguise…
"They're ruining the economy because they don't have money to spend"
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
If a streaming company is greedy and lets you use the same card each sign up, you can indefinitely use their service for free using an endless supply of free emails.
I had Foxtel Go, an online pay tv service in Australia, for free for 2 years before I got bored of it, I think I fucked up like 3 times and had to pay, but as long as you cancel it a day or 2 before, you'll be fine.
I cancelled my YouTube subscription when they increased the price by 50%, and I'm never subscribing again.
I haven't bought a full price game in decades, unless it's an indie/under €30.
I'm finally building up my PS4 game collection, for ages I had 2 games - RD2 and FFXV. Yesterday I got this in the mail, I paid less for those 4 used games than what Sony is asking for a digital copy of FFVII Remake in their store...

They should learn how to sail the high seas
And these services are mad cause it's so cheap for us to do that. Subscribe when the full seasons are out, binge watch what you want, leave.