Microsoft just raised the price of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate to $29.99/month, and fans aren’t happy. Many are canceling, some are calling for a boycott, and even Microsoft’s website is struggling to keep up.
Are people dumb? How else will microsoft fund their AI features for another additional 2 weeks?
Hah oh man I hope this is indicative of a Great Cancelation Event coming to punish all the capitalists, where we take the relatively minor power we have a individuals and combine it to smash the fuck out of them.
The Kimmel Disney thing showed people that we have the power at the end of the day, I hope these XBox games can hang tough and kick Microsoft right in the dick.
(Also maybe give these conglomerates some second thoughts about buying another company…)
I hope these XBox games can hang tough and kick Microsoft right in the dick.
Are you implying Bill Gates has a dick? I don’t think he does. Maybe a soft micropenis.
So micro soft?
Well he cheated on his wife with something
He must have flown the Lolita express for a reason.
My wife and I have been slowly over the last few years finding ways to cancel our subscriptions and just own things. If I want to play a vintage game, I buy a physical copy and boot up an emulator. We also set up navidrome and started collecting discs to rip. My wife backed up her spotify playlists before cancelling and we’re trying to find a way to link them to music tracks that we own and make a list of what we’re missing.
Not a terribly challenging task, but I looked around online to see if anyone else was doing it. What I found was dozens of projects going the other way. People saying “I’m looking to ditch my MP3s and move to Spotify.”
It’s certainly less work, but I wonder how all of these people will feel when they’re locked in and their monthly costs for these services increases and there’s absolutely nothing they can do about it.
Being able to do whatever you want with your physical media is so incredibly freeing. Seems like many born after the 90s don’t seem to quite have a grasp on what that’s like.
I have a digital projector that we take camping. It runs androidOS and you can install apps on it. There is no wifi when camping.
Movies ripped to a thumb drive saves the day.
In 1996, I watched Back to the Future on VHS on a portable CRT TV.
Also the ability to pull a clip from any film you own to create the perfect reaction gif is super nice.
Definitely not alone. For the music I’ve rediscovered record stores. They’re great ways to fill in the gaps of your music library while also discovering new music. I buy CDs and take them home now, happy to keep them on my shelf.
I switched to music streaming (Qobuz) because hi res is too expensive for the amount of music I listen to.
Movies are Garbage quality in streaming though, buying a Blu Ray is so much better and I don’t watch many movies anyways.
I buy a physical copy
🫡
You two sound great (would beer)
Pirated enough games in my childhood. It’s the least I could do.
I canceled spoofy earlier this year and have been slowly building my library proper ever since. honestly I’ve always preferred direct downloading my music over streaming because I can access it all offline, I only started using Spotify when my sd card corrupted and I lost all my music on it. tbf it was all pirated cause I was a broke kid but now that I’m buying everything I’m making sure to have backups and physical CDs when I can get them so it never has to be a problem again!
and honestly it’s been SO FUN looking up artists and albums, listening to songs Ive previously ignored or were part of like a collaboration and realizing I really like them. i even got the guts to email one of my favorite artists to inquire about songs he didn’t have on his bandcamp (he sold the rights to em so he can’t sell the songs 😔) and now I look forward to the monthly album I buy to bolster my collection.
My wife loves bandcamp. Especially the sales where they give 100% of the revenue to the artist.
Friday, Oct 3 is one of those sales… tomorrow as of this comment.
This is the way. The new quiet revolution where we dont buy the bullshit anymore.
Back in 2015 or so, I noticed some of the movies on Netflix that I wanted to rewatch disappeared. I caught on pretty early that this was going to be the case where all the good stuff cycles out, so I took to building a Blu-Ray collection. Now all of my favorites are quick and easy to get to.
At some point I’m planning on digitizing the whole collection because I know discs degrade, but I’ve been hesitant because I don’t want to cook my drive’s laser in the process.
I take a hybrid approach. I’ll buy a movie from my local shop and then go sailing the seas for a digital copy. Much…grayer… but close enough.
You can get bluray drives used for like $30. The real issue is the 4k drives because only certain older models let you rip those. They’re harder to replace.
Ah, I guess I was taking for granted that 4k was one of my requirements. Hadn’t even thought to mention it.
Yeah, I’d say my collection is maybe 5% 4k (over 1000 titles in total). Some discs are reeeeal finnicky. I actually thought my drive was toast at one point, but I was able to take it apart and clean the lens with some IPA to get it working again. Wasn’t looking forward to replacing it.
You can always get a stack of usb dvd drives, and use those.
The challenge is finding a model that lets you rip them. To my awareness, there isn’t any officially supported method to rip BluRays and you have to modify the firmware to let you backup your own media.
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How are you liking navidrome? I’ve been using Jellyfin for everything, using the finamp app for music, and it’s been pretty good. I’ve heard good things about navidrome but I already had Jellyfin set up on my server so I just stuck with it for music too. I don’t have much music on there yet though so I’d consider moving over to navidrome if it was a considerable improvement. I did try to get it set up a few weeks back but couldn’t get it right away and got busy afterwards.
My wife is the music person, so I set it up for her. She seems to like it. I had funkwhale originally, but it doesn’t have nearly the features (though it does support multiple users’ libraries).
The plan is to generate playlists in navidrome and match the filesystems so she can just drag them to her iPod. I haven’t looked into it all too much, but one annoying thing is that some things are kept in the database that I wish were plaintext. Like, I think you can rename files and whatever in the web interface, but it doesn’t modify the original files. I guess that’s okay if you’re nervous about busting your files, but I wish you had a little more control over it.
Yeah, Navidrome does not alter your files by design. I use MP3tag to do all my editing. Operations are a bit slow when the files are on my server, but otherwise I have a decent flow down.
I don’t love Navidrome’s preference for Musicbrainz tags, but I know I can change that.
I agree with everything you’re saying, however it’s a bit much to claim anyone would ever be “locked in” can always just cancel the subscription lol
Go ahead and try to buy a copy of Klaus on DVD.
🏴☠️
If you’ve made a good faith effort to buy something and it’s simply not on the market, the creator isn’t losing anything by you pirating it
Won’t give them the satisfaction. There are plenty of other Christmas movies (we actually have like 4 days worth).
3 more days to cover, then. Hop to it!
If they haven’t already included the Die Hard movies are they even trying?
I can assume what your point is, but can you clarify why? Lol
We’re moving into a space where the only way to access certain types of content that was previously ownable is now through subscription.
There is absolutely no technical reason why Klaus is only available on streaming. It doesn’t require special live-servers to run. There is no staff maintaining it. There are no monthly updates. It’s just 20 gigs of data on someone else’s hard drive that you aren’t allowed to have.
See but it was only released that way, it’s not like it was physical and became digital only (as far as I’m aware) it’s like music or YouTube videos, it is primarily a digital platform and medium.
As someone who’s been digital only with media for nearly a decade and a half, it doesn’t matter to me if I can physically buy it, can I get it digitally somehow? Yes.
But what if you can’t get it? Go try to watch the Willow TV show on Disney+. There is no longer a legal way to watch it. They removed it from the service. You can’t buy it. It’s gone. Disney has also been editing its classic movies like Lilo and Stitch and Splash to remove parts that I guess they found objectionable.
When Robert Redford died, a bunch of streaming services took down his movies and locked them behind a premium paywall. They know you’ll pay more, so they’ll make you pay more. For absolutely zero additional benefit to you or work on their part.
The trend that entertainment and culture are increasingly held hostage behind a paywall and subject to edits is dystopian as hell. What’s to stop Spotify or Netflix from moving all of your favorite media to Spotify Pro or Netflix Premium? What if there’s no other way to acquire that media? How much would you pay per month to experience it again? In what way is this a service that benefits the consumer?
I like my collection of movies, shows, and music, and as long as I’m careful not to lose the files, I can experience them, unchanged, for as long as I like.
it’s not like it was physical and became digital only
And that is happening. Many movies are out of print. DVDs don’t always last forever. There has never been a legal way to obtain a movie in a DRM-free digital format. Ripping backups from discs is the only way to guarantee they are preserved and available forever.
Purely legal means is the issue here, I agree it’s a problem that they’re do things like that, I just feel that if they’re going to take those routes and make it literally impossible for me to own something well… There are rather easy ways around that, and if I can directly support those who made that piece of media, I will!
Well, mp3s are crap. I’m sure if they had built a collection around flacs, they wouldn’t feel this way.
I was planning to cancel it a while ago but this actually made me do it.
Why?
- because of life obligations I consider myself lucky if I can play something once per week.
- with the money that I spend on the subscription I can buy a (more) older game(s) and keep myself entertained for half a year.
- having the latest releases is nice, but I can wait one year and buy it on some sale and if not… mneh… Whatever…
- sure you get hundreds of games with Game Pass, but most of them are either noise or not my type of genre.
- fuck Microsoft.
Yeah, I’m in a similar situation. Don’t get a lot of game time and I’ve got a pretty large backlog of stuff I want to play. If I like the look of something I wishlist it and buy it on sale for less than £10.
I think the gamepass model is going to be struggling with economic factors - many of us are working more and have less playtime, and money is tighter.
Right. Microsoft’s website is struggling. The same Microsoft whose core business model is selling server/cloud infrastructure? Yeah, I definitely believe that.
Counterpoint:
Do you remember Xbox Live?
The thing I hate the most about XBox live is it convinced Sony that they should make the PlayStation network paid for as well.
Sure I know someone has to host all the shit, but man it sure would be nice to play games without having to pay for other services after paying for the game.
The number of games you can play offline seemed to plumit after Microsoft/Sony made paid for network access.
So, I actually used to work for MSFT a decade ago.
The uh… Xbox people and the corpo business people were, once upon a time, wildly different kinds of people, literally problematic 90s pc gamer dude bros vs ex IBM stodgy walrus people.
Basically, the walrus people won, made all the big boy business decisions, and things rather rapidly went to shit in terms of the business decisions being just insanely corpo.
Like uh, at the time Xbox Live came out… well there was this whole other paradigm for online video gaming set by Valve, but uh… lets just say you shouldn’t talk about Gabe Newell while standing on or sitting in a Microsoft campus.
I didn’t really have that important of a role, but lets just say I knew that half of Xbox 360s were coding 3RR or faulty in some way that necessitated a complete replacement (they’d just swap your hardrive into a new model and claim they refurbed it LOL) … yeah I knew that about a decade before that became wider public knowledge.
But anyway, here we are about 20 years later, Valve is having MSFT’s cake, eating it too, and the remaining husks on the gaming side of MSFT absolutely know they are fucking cooked, and are fully in the ‘suck all the money outta this shit while we still can’ phase, before the entire concept of MSFT gaming basically transitions to more or less a legacy system.
They’re rapidly headed toward just being a B2B oriented company, maybe they’ll use their hoard of IPs to effectively liscense out game dev, but when ‘everything is an Xbox’, fucking nothing is and they know that.
Game server uptime isn’t as profit able as business server uptime, either pump those numbers up or your branch of MSFT goes the way of the Windows Phone and Zune.
You know they are like, massively downsizing, right?
Yeah, Seattle (and environs) is looking fairly fucked these days with Boeing imploding and all the major tech companies doing mass layoffs, BelRed property values are probably gonna tank lol.
lets just say you shouldn’t talk about Gabe Newell while standing on or sitting in a Microsoft campus
Ugh, that evil G-man with his S-word!
Didnt do Playstation any good, their online service was still just as shit, they just pocketed the money. I think consoles reached their peak anyway, PC is a much more accessible and appealing option now, the market is shifting.
They most likely, and purposefully, relegate few assets to a cancellation page.
Yeah, that’s what was subtly hinting at.
This post tells me you’re not required to use Power Automate for work. It must be nice.
If you don’t believe Microsoft can fail at the things they’re supposed to be best at…lol …you 12?
Right, they’re supposed to be best at letting you cancel their services. They could handle the traffic, I’m just sure they choose not to.
This is the endgame of all subscriptions. I have not one. Purchase where they will let you purchase without DRM, for the rest: 🏴☠️
Unfortunately piracy doesn’t help the people who need it here. Hard to pirate on an Xbox, and Xbox players aren’t generally the type to just ditch the ecosystem where all of their game progress and friends are just to jump to a platform they have no experience or history with
Switch to gaming on Windows? Windows sucks compared to Linux, but for people who don’t wanna leave the ecosystem, Windows should be quite compatible with most Xbox games and multiplayer. Also it’s absurdly easy to pirate games on using a .site like fitgirl-repacks
Two problems: I’m a console player because I have no money for PC parts, so I’m priced out already. But also, if I did have a good computer, I’d have to convince my friends to all pick up PCs as well, and I think they’d sooner quit gaming altogether than switch to mouse + keyboard
Even if 1/3 of their subscribers cancel they still come out ahead because of lower infrastructure costs. i doubt they are going to see a 1/3 reduction in subscribers, so capitalist exploitation and enshittification will win again.
It’s still better for people overall if the parasites take larger sums from fewer willing idiots compared to them taking less each from more people, even if their bottom line is unaffected.
It was always going to end like this. If you’re surprised, I hope you learned a valuable lesson.
Yeah. I lay for YouTube Premium. And it has already gone up. If it goes up any further though I may have to cancel. The whole family uses it though so cancelling it will affect more than just me. They aren’t tech savvy enough to avoid ads.
Now if YouTube blocks sharing a family account across houses (in my country) then they will make the decision really simple.
Jesus Fucking Christ, it was $4.99/month a few years ago; what did Microsoft expect? Even at that price it was hardly worth paying for…
I haven’t paid a subscription for entertainment for a handful of years now, but now I’m starting to understand why people are canceling streaming services en masse. Disney+ was $6.99/mo back when I had it but I heard it’s also $20-something a month now too. People just needed a good excuse to cancel, and now they have one.
Theoretically, now that Microsoft owns half the AAA studios, you could expect Gamepass to have a lot of day 1 AAA games.
Unfortunately, they just bought all the studios and… ordered them to stop making games or something.
I’d cancel if I hadn’t done it several years ago. Oh well.
At 5 euros a month it was a steal. It was an amazing value in the moment and games deflate quickly. Economic realities ended it. But that doesn’t mean it was shit.
When was game pass ever $5? I always remember it being 10.
There’s been a glitch on my Xbox where I haven’t paid for one pass in 10 years but still have access to all the game. I never intentionally subverted the rules but it somehow happened
Maybe I’m too old, but I never understood the appeal of game passes, you can’t play hundreds of games at the same time unless you have nothing else to do in your life, and most of them are garbage anyway.
Only reasonable subscription model to me is MMOs, because those require a complex infrastructure to run, but non-MMO games? No thank you, I’ll just turn to indies that still sell games without any live-service bullshit.
When a new game costs 60 bucks, just paying for a game pass and have access to a random library seems appealing. It’s also a nice way to try and discover games I guess. I never used it.
Here in Brazil (and problably most of the developing world as well), piracy used to be the standard way to get console games. People would buy unblocked consoles from street merchants and then buy pirated media from them, or download the games from pirate sites.
But with the newer xbox xs series, they made it so that piracy is impossible, and people got forced to buy games from microsoft. Since most people around here don’t have much money to spend, game pass became an option to have a selection of games always at disposal for a reasonable price, so it became popular. Sadly, that’s how microsoft expanded their business to the developing countries.
Cloud play allows local couch co-op without a second console/version of the game.
Back in my day we had split screen multiplayer
Still irritates me that modern games don’t have this. Surely it’s not that hard to implement in modern games.
And in the case of the master chief collection? They literally just… Turned it off. The code is there, it could work, but they say no.
If you buy it on Xbox, you can do splitscreen. If you buy it on PC? You cannot.
However, if you use alpharing, you can patch the game with literal kilobytes of code, and force activate splitscreen. It’s a little janky, but proves the code is in there, it’s just turned off.
Disgusting.
Yeah this pisses me off as well. And TVs now are much bigger and wider, too. Back in the day we’d split screen on whatever we had, which was more often than not an almost-square CRT with not much screen space to begin with!
I hate it, but it’s easy to justify from a dev perspective. If it’s switched off it doesn’t need to be tested.
Edit: on difficulty to implement - I’m guessing it’s down to the increased load from having to render twice on a single device, bigger higher res screens only make this more difficult. Likely needs to be optimised differently etc. I hate it too, I love couch co-op.
I mean, yeah I’d entirely prefer that too. But on a halo series play through you hit a wall with halo 5.
Back when it was under the price of 2 games a year it was a pretty good deal. Thinking of buying the next Halo and Forza? Get gamepass and save money, and have the opportunity to try a bunch of other stuff you wouldn’t have played.
There’s amazing games like Hades and Slay the Spire that I wouldn’t have been interested enough in to purchase that are now among my favorites because Gamepass let me try them.
Honestly, I think the better route would be to keep it cheap but not include new releases. Let people access the back catalog affordably with games that aren’t brining in much new revenue anyway. People will discover games and genres they otherwise would not have played, which will create new markets and boost ssales of new releases.
It can probably make sense if you play a lot. You can try out a lot of different games without buyers remorse. I know steam has a good return policy but sometimes you just miss the return window.
Personally, I just wait a few years and buy everything in the steam sale for under 30% of original price.
Steam does demo fests with tons of new games to try completely free, that’s my goto when I want to try something new, true that not all games offer a demo but that’s devs loss imo, if they believe in their games they shouldn’t be afraid of releasing a demo.
I too usually wait for discounts (got Mass Effect legendary edition at 10$ xD), especially on GOG, only exception are games like BG3 or Expedition 33, for those I’m happy to pay full price the moment they release.
They make sense if you play through enough titles. If you have a pass and only ever play one game, that’s probably a bad idea.
This was just the reminder I needed to cancel as I moved over to Linux and they don’t support Linux or have an app. Didn’t realize that it was going to go up again.
I was thinking about giving it a try for a while, the PC version, anyway. Won’t be doing that now.
Literally had the convo with someone to get it Saturday, glad I didn’t jump on it
Oh yea, I knew I forgot to cancel something after switching my gaming pc to Linux.
The inevitable, it was always going to rise, it was loss-leader to get market share.
I tried telling so many people that and their answer was always either so what, or no it wont. Well, here we are. If you own a thing the price doesn’t go up
This is written like it was stupid of people to jump on game pass when it was cheap. I knew it would go the way of pretty much ever single online subscription eventually. Enshittification is inevitable. But it was absolutely a killer deal for a while there.
For a year’s subscription was 180 at its best, which is 3 60 dollar games per year you could have bought instead, and still have them now to play. Instead that money is gone.
So I’m not denying that it wasn’t a good value prop to you, but you individually one has to look back and decide did they play enough games and did they really get the value out of it then, and they will never want to play any of those games again
That math just isn’t true. I was on and off game pass from 2019-2021, and every time I resubscribed it was in part because they’d offer me 1-3 months for $1 each, and then $10 for the next month or two before I would cancel. During those periods I would play the games I would never go out of my way to buy to try (Forager, Slime Rancher, Donut County) and multiplayer campaigns with my buddy that I knew I’d never play again (Gears of War 5, Journey to the Strange Planet, Wolfenstein Young Blood). It was never going to last, but there was a time where game pass was insanely good value if you did it right.
So I’m not denying that it wasn’t a good value prop to you, but you individually one has to look back and decide did they play enough games and did they really get the value out of it then, and they will never want to play any of those games again
So you got a good value prop out of it. Congrats. To others I don’t think it was. I don’t think as many people were as strategic with it as you were.
