If someone comes in and points out a bunch of valid similarities, are you going to start being nice, or are you just going to call that person's ideas stupid too?
One is that they don't really want to sell a lifetime subscription, but it'll look bad if they discontinue the option. This way, they effectively don't sell them anymore, but there aren't people all screaming "They've discontinued lifetime subscriptions. How long until they take away the ones they sold before?!"
Another possible explanation is that it's just a ruse to sell more subscriptions. They probably sold a ton of subscriptions last time a price increase was announced. So, if they need a cash infusion, just announce another price increase. Then, when it turns out nobody buys at $750, decrease the price later on to return to normal.
TFA outright states that they don’t want to sell the Lifetime option anymore but don’t want to rug pull customers that want it, so they’re increasing the cost substantially to a price they’d be happy with
I’m curious how they determined $750 is fair. Is it just N * Annual_Price and if so why is this value of N fair? But they likely won’t say
It's literally called fuck off pricing. A price that's so high you get the buyer to fuck off so you don't need to deal with them, and if they buy it anyway you're happy with the ludicrous mark up. The $750 isn't supposed to be fair it's I don't want to deal with the maths on making money off this figuring out what inflation will be for the next 100 years or the maths for actual lifetime or server improvements deflating expenses etc etc so just get a subscription or fuck off.
> Musk at one time said something like "I work 80+ hours a week, so the people around me should work that much too". They are completely blind to how sociopathic they are. It's a totally unhealthy amount to work for one, but for two is Musk himself will likely earn billions from those workweeks while the people around him will earn almost nothing except stress and then getting randomly fired by him on a whim.
Beyond that, normal people also have other things besides work that will take up their time. It's a lot easier to work 80 hours a week when you're rich enough that you don't ever have to do laundry, clean the house, cook, take care of your kids, tend to a sick relative, sit in a waiting room for 6 hours, be stuck in traffic for 45 minutes, etc.
One of the reasons that working a lot sucks for most of us is that we still have to go home and do the laundry or whatever.
I'm starting to think that the most likely solution to this problem is that one or more generations leave things in such bad shape that everyone dies. Problem solved, no future generations to be worse off than prior ones!
I think it's one of the last remnants of "don't be evil" at Google -- the Pixel devices are quite friendly toward alternative installs, much more so than most manufacturers.
And, now that Motorola and Graphene OS have announced a partnership, future Motorola devices may be a good option as well.
I still think it's weird that Valve is viewed as so friendly to gamers when they're probably more responsible for taking away game ownership on PC than any other one company.
Prior to Steam, I used to routinely buy used games, give away copies of games I didn't play anymore, etc. Steam basically ruined all of that.
Prior to Steam there was StarForce and other copy protection messing up your OS and DVD drives, and plenty of stuff needed online activation as well. Of the last few physical games I bought, none work anymore, Bioshock couldn't be installed due to lack of patch servers last time I tried and Arkham Asylum failed due to GFWL being dead. Even when everything worked, you often had to manually go hunt for patches, sometimes multiple that needed to be installed in the right order, and that might not even be compatible with the localized version of the game you had.
Still sucks that used games died and the forced game upgrades that come with Steam have their issues too, but PC gaming was a horrible mess before Steam cleaned that up. Heck, I'd rather rebuy a game on Steam than find out what those vintage DVD copy protection does to a modern Windows. Most PCs don't even have a DVD drive anymore anyway.
There were definitely issues, but I think that some of those basically extend from Steam and the way it worked. GFWL was Microsoft's competition to Steam, so it just copied Steam (~3 years after a Steam came out) and worked similarly to the way other physical releases worked after Steam became popular.
It's true that some of the heavy DRM was an issue back then, but I'm not convinced that's guaranteed to be less of an issue going forward. Steam probably won't live forever, and there are tons of titles on Steam that use Steam DRM, third party DRM, or rely on servers that will kill the game eventually. Just because the lifecycle is longer now doesn't make it less of a mistake than it was previously.
My biggest complaint, though, is that the ownership terms simply got shittier with Steam. Many of those old games, even from big, "evil" publishers like EA, explicitly allow license transfers in their EULAs. Steam explicitly forbids transfers.
> I'm not convinced that's guaranteed to be less of an issue going forward.
I am sure it's going to be an issue at some point in the future, it already is an issue when it comes to sharing games or keeping older versions around, but what's the alternative? The alternative isn't no DRM, it's whatever DRM Apple, Google, Microsoft, Epic, EA and friends come up with, and of all of those, I take Steam any day.
Even GOG kind of loses to Steam here, as while GOG gave us DRM-free downloads, Steam gave us Linux support and Windows-emulation and I'd rather have Steam DRM on Linux than being stuck on Windows with DRM-free GOG games. And unless I am missing something, GOG's DRM-free games didn't lead to a used digital games market either, they explicitly forbid selling or sharing in their user agreement[1]:
>> 3.3 Your GOG account and GOG content [games] are personal to you and cannot be shared with, sold, gifted or transferred to anyone else.
Digital goods ownership is just not a thing that exists at the moment. There was an attempt based on blockchain with Robot Cache[1], but that just shutdown.
Says you. Steam made DRM a no-brainer for developers and even got almost all players to stop complaining about it. If that hadn't happened who's to say where we would have ended up.
> Steam gave us Linux support and Windows-emulation
No, Wine gave us Windows-emulation. Even DXVK was not originally developed by Valve. They polished it all to make it more user friendly and fixed game specific issues, which is nice of course, but let's not pretend that it was simply impossible to play Windows games before Gaben graced us with his attention.
> Digital goods ownership is just not a thing that exists at the moment. There was an attempt based on blockchain with Robot Cache[1], but that just shutdown.
Right of first sale is well tested for digital goods sold on physical media and cannot be restricted by EULAs no matter what they say. Do you have evidence that courts would see this differently with a digital download?
> If that hadn't happened who's to say where we would have ended up.
We went through numerous years of that before Steam became a thing, almost a whole decade passed between the Internet getting popular and Steam really taking off. DRM filled DVDs and online installs with activation limits were the results.
> but let's not pretend that it was simply impossible to play Windows games before Gaben graced us with his attention.
Let's also not pretend that fiddling for hours with Wine configs is somehow similar to pressing "Play" and having stuff Just Work™. That extra level of polish that Valve provided is critical for making it actually useful for the masses.
> Do you have evidence that courts would see this differently with a digital download?
Can you show me a place were I can buy used digital games? Itch.io doesn't disallow reselling games as far as I can tell, but yet we don't have a used digital games market. Buying a random .zip file, with no proof of ownership, is just not something people are interesting in.
Not really… the rules were heavily influenced by big tech in a way that basically exempts many devices. For example iPhone 15 onwards already meets the defined standard and thus doesn’t need a user replaceable battery.
So the headline is misleading. Removable batteries aren’t mandatory. They’re only mandatory if the battery fails to meet certain performance standards.
Based on other comments, there are apparently two separate sets of rules. One of them has exceptions and supplies specifically to phones and tablets, and one of them doesn't have any exceptions and applies more generally.
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