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I hate people defending subscriptions. They are not required for anything other than insurance or something you guaranteed will keep, like phone contracts. If they need more money for content, release content packs and dlc. Online should not cost, especially if someone like Nintendo is using peer2peer or will shut down the online servers anyways at some point.
I prefer paying for services with my money insead of with my data, but I can see both sides.🤷
Paying with your money and your data is more likely. The issue is not subscriptions imo either. It is getting sucked into megacorp schemes that will destroy competition with cheap prices and then enshittify and or raise prises once there is no alternative. Oh, and influence legislators to make competition illegal (youtube got big on copyright infringement).
Therefore I reduce megacorp stuff. I shop local, watch my dvds and started buying music again.
They can fuck off. So can everyone who has this neat reason why resistance to megacorps is futile.
Sure, I too would prefer to pay with money instead of data. But that's a false dichotomy. Many of the services that require subscription also collect your data. Whereas offline local solutions do not collect your data. There are things were you pay with money and data, there are things where you pay with just money, or just data, and there are things where you don't pay at all. So it isn't really a 'both sides' issue.
Thats true, and as it is, its impossible to be completely rid of data harvesting services. I made the switch to proton to get out of googles mail, drive and photo solutions, the have a vpn included aswell. but yeah, I would never trust Google, Microsoft, meta or any of those to not collect data, no matter what they promise.
Subscription based service makes data harvesting much easier. Spotify can force you to connect to their server even if you downloaded your song, in the name of "verifying your subscription".
Buy the songs, buy the movie, take them offline.
That being said there are good subscription based service, like home assistant cloud, where all your communications are always E2E encrypted and cannot be seen by their server. Their subscription model is justified, as they rent their servers.
I'm pretty sure you're paying with both as it is
I prefer not paying
Online servers cost money.
Id rather an online game charge me a monthly subscription and give me access to all content rather than ftp with half the content in the cash shop.
I also don't mind a subscription, if its reasonably priced and it's easy to cancel. But you could also have one time payment and all the content plus online. Elden Ring has that for example.
You shouldn't have to pay to use someone else's computer? Also there's more software than just games in the world, I don't see how loot boxes would work for google drive.