> The streaming platforms, for which you pay full price, don’t even let you choose the quality of the movie you want to watch. What you watch today might disappear from all platforms in two months.
I have seen so many songs disappear from Spotify lately that I am considering to hoard music again. Gladly I have most of those that disappeared on my HDD anyways, since it's been mostly old songs, but yeah. Was kinda frustrating. Maybe it's the task for this winter to go through my spotify playlists and find out which music I do not own yet
It's nice of Spotify to at least leave the names of the songs.
Years ago I had several huge music video playlists which today stand at 80% of what they previously were.
I've experienced this for over a decade. If I like the music I'm renting, I buy the CD and rip it to FLAC.
This is even easier if it's on Bandcamp :)
This and also the increasing number of adverts/sponsored recommendations and annoying notification for stuff I don't follow.
How do you discover new music? That's been an issue for me, considering how I don't use Spotify.
You read forums, buy magazines, or, just buy an album because it has some badass cover. At least that's how I did it back in the days. ;)
[redacted]'s daily and weekly top10. Last.fm, reddit, Apple Music.
Sure while Spotify can be nice with that, I am an old boomer that mostly sticks to what I grew up with and I just look for new albums of known artists every now and then, but I find the real gems in things like mountainbike movies. Also gameplay movies back in the day.
But yeah that ease to find new things is one positive aspect of Spotify. Also to have it everywhere available. So maybe going both ways would be the solution. Using Spotify while buying/ripping/whatever the music that I really deeply value
Bandcamp.com
last.fm
Having worked in the game industry in the past it's amusing to see people talk about the greed of game developers. You have no idea! You have no idea what an effort it takes to ship a game. An album is the work of one or a few individuals for a relatively short period of time with very little cost. Because of that you can have services like Spotify that allow pretty much access to all the music ever created for a 10$ fee. The math just doesn't work with video games. Video games take an army of developers and years of work to make. Game development is one of the hardest and worst paying professions in tech. Most people in the industry are there not for the money but because of their passion for the profession. Most games fail to pay for their production costs despite all the effort that goes into them. Companies who have had a few mega successes have to make enough money out of their popular titles to be able to pay for all the other titles that fail to pay for themselves. Please don't complain about video game prices!
When people say "greed of game developers" they're clearly not talking about rank-and-file devs, they're talking about development companies.
> An album is the work of one or a few individuals for a relatively short period of time with very little cost
Kind of ironic that you're saying that.
> services like Spotify [...] allow pretty much access to all the music ever created for a 10$ fee. The math just doesn't work with video games.
Are you not describing XBox Game Pass?
Why not both. Big tech is greedy. It also is a difficult domain. There are people and companies with passion. There are also big companies trying to milk every penny out of their customers, not caring about the product, and customers.
Take mobile games for example. I am not sure how much passion goes into majority of products in that space.
Counterpoint: Rockstar.
They take a long time to make games, but it's always very good quality.
At least enough for people to want to buy them over and over. Their game are not cheap but aren't more expensive than others triple A, yet they make a ton of money and Take 2 interactive stocks are doing great.
I'd say it's more that the gaming market is extremely concurrentiel, either you're very good at what you do, or you got load of money for marketing campaign, but if you got neither it's barely profitable. Increasing the price of your games in that case won't solve the issue, people would buy even less of your company's game.
> Most games fail to pay for their production costs despite all the effort that goes into them.
Yet for decades before the forced-online/micro-transaction ecosystem, tens (hundreds?) of thousands of games were made, sold for a singular price and the industry spun on.
Nobody is complaining about the price, the complaint is about the indentured nature of modern game sales and the ephemeral state of the online elements that most players don't want or care about.
Doom and Doom 2... shareware, try it before buy it. And mod ability and open source later... id Software was great, shame they are gone now...
This is from a gamer's PoV, not someone in the industry:
AAA Games are too expensive. Pricing for a retail product is not solely based on the cost to produce it, you have to price in what the market will bear and I think the games industry just isn't doing that. £60 or £70 for a base game (that often has microtransactions in it, or is often kinda incomplete with major plot still to be delivered via DLC, usually with £80 or £90 'premium' editions) is a lot of money for what are already stretched budgets. Most gamers I know wait for sales with significant discounts (50% or more) before they even consider buying AAA titles.
If you can't make a game affordable, then maybe the big AAA industry is making the wrong games, oversaturating the marketplace, or quality is suffering. Starfield's a good example - years of work to produce a game that is resoundingly 'meh'. You can't expect customers to shell out £60+ for 'meh', no matter how many people or resources were used to create it.
There's a lot of smaller 'indie' developers that do not have hundreds of staff that are making games that the market engages with and seems to love. Anecdotally I know my friend group generally prefers these titles to AAA. They frequently fill a significant percentage of the Steam Top Selling lists and these lists are sorted by revenue, not by number of sales. Their prices are more affordable (£10, £15, £20 or £30 are common price points) compared to AAA titles that are trying to cling to that £60 price point.
Did you read the article? The problem is not the price, the problem is you can't buy and own stuff no matter what you pay.
Ah, fitgirl to the rescue :) Helped me so many time to decide to buy the game,., For example Horizon Zero Dawn, played fitgirl release, loved it, purchased original. But still. fitgirl release is better as it does not require Internet!
Corollary: If a digital product is not actively being sold, piracy is not stealing. No, an old physical copy being on sale on Ebay does not count.
Nintendo, take note.
> "Look, no one pirates music anymore"
I must be the last person that does then. All my music is ripped from youtube
Do yourself the favor of joining Red and download your music in flac or mp3 made from high-quality sources instead of YouTube. The interview is not hard to pass if you prepare for it.
I'm not entirely sure what Red is, but all my music is in MP3 and it sounds fine to me. I'm not exactly an audiophile, so youtube music over bluetooth headphones sounds perfectly acceptable to me. It has the beeps and boops that I desire
Was red the eventual winner after what/pth? I never found out what happened post what.
pth was red's former name
I think so, yeah. Although orpheus is also all right.
Then there's two of us
The main problem with digital game distribution imo is that you still pay the full price, but you can't resell the game later. So you're getting much less value in the end. It would be fairer to price digital copies maybe 10-20% of the physical ones because of how single-use they are.
I think this is conflating two problems.
One is preservation and ownership (or lack of), which is a huge problem. Live service games aside, even if you buy physical, what’s on the disc is often unplayable or incomplete without a day-one patch, so you’re just as screwed when the servers go offline. I’ve heard this period described as a future dark ages for games due to how many will be lost, and I think I agree. It’s thanks to the work of “pirates” and true hackers that I’m able to still play digital-only 3DS games for example, because I literally have no legal way to purchase them anymore.
The other is cost. It seems like the author is in Turkey so I can’t comment on local affordability, but if anything many games are too cheap, not too expensive. Your typical triple-A game now is unfathomably expensive to make and needs thousands of people to do so. Now personally, I’m not big into those sorts of games. I think trying to create huge games rammed with endless shallow side-quests just for the sake of being bigger than the last one is a pointless endeavour and makes for a worse product, but evidently enough people think otherwise cause they keep getting made.
Yes, it is bullshit that digital versions are not only the same price, but often more expensive than physical counterparts (at least here in the UK). But new games were £50/$60USD for so long, which neither kept up with inflation or the rising scale and costs of production. Even today’s typical £60/$70 is far below what games cost in the 90s when you factor in inflation. I dunno what to do here besides keep supporting smaller, less expensive indie output, of which there is a wonderful volume.
Regarding preservation, even with a user-friendly format, platforms that allow downloading a zip archive or mkv in the desired quality provide no guarantee that the content will exist in 10 years. HDDs fail, they get lost, etc. The reason why old content is difficult to find is not because it's in the wrong format—FLAC copies of all albums ever made exist, and copies of all movies exist, but they are illegal to share.
It's not so much a technical issue as it is a legal one: the only way to reliably preserve content is to ensure it can be shared. One solution might be to limit IP duration to only a few years.
GOG exists. Blu-ray discs of movies, shows and music exist. Even when consumers have the option to buy from those modes, they don't. They prefer Steam and Netflix and Spotify instead.
Why? Because contrary to the opinion of a couple of online aficionados, the masses don't care that much about preserving media after they have consumed them once, or once the trend has subsided. The market has spoken, the affordability and convenience of not having to manage one's own collection beats the slight lack of guarantee.
Steam doesn’t really compare to Netflix and Spotify - it’s not a subscription service where you can play whatever is currently available and titles appear and disappear with no notice.
You buy individual games on Steam and it stays on your account indefinitely - you do have to pick and choose what you buy.
Something like Microsoft’s Game Pass is closer to Netflix and Spotify than Steam.
Steam is more like the old iTunes Music Store model.
> Steam doesn’t really compare to Netflix and Spotify - it’s not a subscription service where you can play whatever is currently available and titles appear and disappear with no notice.
This is true, you don't need to pay an ongoing subscription for continued access to the games.
> You buy individual games on Steam and it stays on your account indefinitely - you do have to pick and choose what you buy.
But I'm very wary of that "indefinitely". Steam doesn't set an expiration date but they can do it at a moment's notice. Save goes for any store where the purchase (rental?) is permanently tied to the store.
Ah, I was meaning "indefinitely" in the sense of "an unspecified period of time" :)
Practically, it's very rare for games to disappear from a Steam library once purchased. It happens for stolen/fraudulently purchased keys (eg keys bought with stolen credit cards), but for a whole game it's very rare.
It has happened, but generally for games that relied on online servers for functionality and the servers have been taken down.
GOG doesn't sell most games. I do buy on GOG when possible, but GOG sells a sliver of what Steam sells.
My term for these kind of purchases is "DRU" - defeasible right to use.
I have pirated everything my whole life and I will proudly pirate these things forever. I do pay for original music, media, movies, but I also pirate everything. These two things are not mutually exclusive and I think every person who is interested in having and owning their own media should be pirating.
How do you pirate songs these days?
youtube, as it has most content and is easy and fast to download
Yep, YouTube and yt-dlp is the easiest way to pirate music nowadays.
Soulseek
Shh.
Try torrents inside I2P.
This. If you really want to support a musician buy their merch not their music. Specifically posters. Posters have the highest profit margin of any merch item and goes directly to the artist… and if you want extra credit, share the pirated music with others so that their fan base grows.
Sure musicians would love to sell albums, but those days are long over. Musicians don’t see squat from ticket sales except in rare circumstances. It’s mostly all guarantees and with live nation owning 100% of the music industry atm good luck to any artist actually going into points. How you can sell out a show and lose money is the most corrupt bs I’ve ever encountered.
- a bitter old tour manger
Very true. I don't know how can get this through to the heads of the artists and have them put some more effort in their merch. I can't count the number of concerts where I carry cash specifically to buy merch, but the merch is crap, so I walk away. Having a dedicated merch manager DOES make a huge difference. E.g. Abbath has one, and I have bought merch in 3 out of 4 concerts in a timespan of 2 years. I don't think this is coincidence.
There is a catch though: venue merch fees [1]. Which may in turn explain why the merch is often crap: The profit margin becomes tiny if you need to pay the merch fee. So you need to choose between exorbitant prices (think $60 for a tshirt) or crap quality to make a profit.
*I hope this is an American thing, which would explain why on average it appears that American bands have worse merch than European ones.
[1] https://variety.com/2023/music/opinion/venue-service-fees-me...
What meme? broken link for me. I wanna see the meme.
It was a twitter link https://files.catbox.moe/cn6yxg.jpg
> They sell games for $60 and then add microtransactions, turning them into service games.
Just. Don't. Buy. This. Crap. There are other games which you can play.
Completely agree. When you see a business model like this, you know everything about the game is made to get you to spend more money and spend more time in it rather than actually have fun.
Maybe that's to be expected from SaaS B2B software or something, but there's no reason to settle for this kind of garbage in games. Tons of alternatives exist in older games, indie games, and even some AAA games where there is a creative vision with a goal that isn't to empty your wallet or waste your time as much as possible.
On Steam this is not hard to do either. There are so many excellent games out there. And if you really want to minimize the cost of games, become a patient gamer. Play top-rated games two or three years after their release when they show up heavily discounted in the summer/winter sales. By then all the bugs have been ironed out if it really was an excellent game, and if the game turned out to be disappointing, it will be reflected in the reviews by then.
Or just get Factorio. You'll never have time for any other game ever again — or a social life for that matter.
Update: The non crap you bought is now micro transaction crap. Bait and switch!
Have you considered alternative ideas now that benevolent capitalism and resposible consumer are falling apart?
Just download some emulators and some roms for them, and you can play thousands of 80s-90s games all you want for free. You'll never have to worry about them turning into microtransaction crap, plus the gameplay is far better than anything current.
Or just pirate new games while you're at it? (Which I fully support.)
Are you able to name 3 examples of this happening?
> Update: The non crap you bought is now micro transaction crap. Bait and switch!
The FTC should consider this fraud. Customers should be allowed refunds if existing functionality goes away.
I don't think Spotify should be celebrated. For a start, Spotify exists because the music companies basically lost against piracy, but it was their own fault. That devalued recorded music to such an extent they had to change that business model. They collect a paltry amount from streaming (the artists get even less), but it's all they can get now. They've changed their model entirely. Bands are gone. Generic, marketable solo artists are in and money is made from concerts. Records are just marketing.
Secondly, though, Spotify is just as bad if you are into proper records rather than concert marketing. Want to listen to Queen? Well, I hope you like the god awful remasters, because that's all that is available on Spotify. And whatever is available right now could change at any moment. It's not a music collection.
The only way the record companies could have kept selling records is with vinyl. But they killed that to get more profits decades ago. Good luck convincing people music is worth sitting down for like people do with books, movies and games. Yeah, let me sit down and listen to Cardi B for the next 40 minutes, said no one. The youth just press play on a playlist and whatever comes out doesn't matter, it's all basically the same anyway.
> Want to listen to Queen? Well, I hope you like the god awful remasters, because that's all that is available on Spotify.
A tangant, but has anyone noticed a number of albums on Spotify have been replaced with "deluxe" versions recently? I feel like every time I go to listen to an old favourite albums of mine, new tracks have been inserted which completely break the flow.
Yes, I've noticed this too. Even worse, I've found some electronic albums that have been "reworked" by the artist so what you get is not at all what you wanted (assuming familiarity with the original).
I recently acquired a decent but affordable record player and was surprised to find new high quality pressings of some of my favorite classics (Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, etc). Plus tons of new pop artists with vinyl. So a small resurgence is ongoing, hopefully it's stable enough to stay alive for long.
They're expensive as hell but the ritual of putting something to play or changing discs when entertaining friends is refreshing in this streaming era.
The one thing Spotify (and other streaming services) has going for it, is that it's fairly cheap compared to other means of acquiring music. You get what you pay for. It's fine if you want to test drive that Queen album before you buy a great vinyl master.
Spotify essentially solves music for me.
I'm not a huge music fan. I like the stuff I grew up with, and very, very rarely something recorded in the last 10 years. I don't study music, rarely actually listen to the lyrics, don't care about the quality too much. It's always background to what I'm actually focusing on. And the less it distracts, the better.
I used to have a few Gb of music, but deleted it all [0] because Spotify fills this niche now.
I pirate books if they have DRM, video all the time. But not music, because (as TFA says) Spotify has basically solved that.
[0] I'm sure I have it all on a backup somewhere. Just in case Spotify enshittifies further.
> I used to have a few Gb of music, but deleted it all [0] because Spotify fills this niche now.
And now instead of reading bits from your local storage you are increasing your carbon impact by streaming from somewhere else...with pretty much 0 actual value.
Well, for the kind of people using music as background, I'm indeed sure Spotify does the job perfectly well.
While Spotify was mentioned in the original post, it isn't the only game in town and there are alternatives like Deezer and Tidal, which offer higher-quality masters, more consistent libraries and ensure a better compensation for artists.
> The only way the record companies could have kept selling records is with vinyl. But they killed that to get more profits decades ago.
Maybe I don't understand something about your point, but why skip over CDs and direct sales of single tracks, as popularized by iTunes? Purely looking at potential profit from sales, I don't see a difference between vinyl and CDs, at least prior to the recent resurgence when vinyl got a premium due to the perceived exclusivity and quality.
> Good luck convincing people music is worth sitting down for like people do with books, movies and games.
Sitting down and listening to music is still greatly appreciated across all ages, at least from what I can tell. That seems somewhat reductive.
> Yeah, let me sit down and listen to Cardi B for the next 40 minutes, said no one.
That seems very reductive.
> The youth just press play on a playlist and whatever comes out doesn't matter, it's all basically the same anyway.
That seems extremely reductive.
I do not know what you were listening to in your youth, but I'd be surprised if there weren't tracks, artists or even whole genres that people of your current age might have looked upon unfavorably in the past.
>> Yeah, let me sit down and listen to Cardi B for the next 40 minutes, said no one.
> That seems very reductive.
It seems, but it isn't. Music is produced for the YouTube/Spotify "formats" these days. Putting together an album that would be listened on a turntable or a cassette player, is a very different task than releasing a Spotify single.
As an analogy, modern artists are more like weekly columnists on a magazine. Past artists were more like book writers. Both categories write, but their output is very much affected by the format they use. And a columnist is very likely to be bad as a book writer, and vice-versa for the book writer.
> Maybe I don't understand something about your point, but why skip over CDs and direct sales of single tracks, as popularized by iTunes?
The way I see it, there are three choices:
1. Sell a physical good and let the free market do its thing,
2. Sell a service and let the free market do its thing,
3. Attempt to create a non-free market using various combinations of technical and legal means (e.g. DRM, copyright etc.)
Vinyl records were an example of (1). They couldn't practically be duplicated. But CDs could and the free market very quickly realised this. So CDs were the beginning of their journey down route (3) which they eventually lost. They have now settled on method (2) just like movies, games and everything else.
1. Being pedantic even if you own the medium(cd, cartrige, floppy disk), you still don’t own the software. You just own the license to use it.
2. So you are pro-Spotify but anti-Steam? All the arguments you gave above against Steam apply to Spotify as well.
Sounds to me you are trying to justify your decision to pirate to yourself.
> 1. Being pedantic even if you own the medium(cd, cartrige, floppy disk), you still don’t own the software. You just own the license to use it.
Per first-sale doctrine, if a license was included with the original medium, then it's irrevocably transferrable to subsequent buyers, without manufacturer being able to sever it, no?
Which is why SaaS and "cloud features" did all they could to danced around and obscure this.
But the reasons still stand, despite the author's conclusion. I agree with all the downsides of streaming/renting software. That's what it should be called. Even when you buy a digital media that remains hosted on a cloud server, you never really own it. There should be a new word for it.
We can call it "buying", even though it doesn't entail "owning", just as long as "pirating" isn't "stealing".
On Spotify you pay a monthly fee and listen to as much music as you want, but on Steam you have to "buy" each game individually.
I have games that I have given money to access many years ago, and I can still select them in Steam and install them without paying rent again.
Steam is better value for me over more than a couple of months, and so was eMusic until Sony ruined it.
How about games that require an account in order to play at all? It's not a new concept and has been around for at least 15 years. Additionally, by modern games relying on matchmaking and lobby systems, almost any multiplayer game over the past 5-10 years is unplayable without an internet connection.
I'm not sure I follow.
Is the argument that Steam is worse than Spotify because a subset of games have got built in self destruct, while Spotify only requires ongoing rent to access that 99¢ song?
I think the self destruct is bad, and requiring 3rd party logins for single player games should not be allowed.
