Netflix and Spotify almost ended Piracy by making it easy to access whatever you wanted for a reasonable fee. Then they got greedy and everyone else wanted a piece of the pie and now we are in a worse position than package bundle Cable TV.
I’m in my late 30’s and went back to the high seas. I used to sail the seas in my early 20’s when i was broke AF and didn’t have cable TV. When Netflix came around it sudden became easier and more convenient to just pay $6.99/ month to watch whatever I wanted. For years I got by with Spotify and Netflix and I didn’t even look back. Then, all of a sudden there were more streaming services than i knew what to do with and every few months they would all raise their price and reduce their libraries. Then they started putting ads in. Now I’m self hosting all of my media and using Stremio/Torentio for my one off TV shows and movies. I directly support creators wherever I can as well, whether it’s Patreon or Kofi or just buying their Merch.
Canadian here. I broke my leg in January. The only thing I ended up paying for was $25 for a pair of crutches. I did have to wait a significant amount of time to get seen, but its a small hospital and someone walked in with a stab wound right after me, so I was okay with it.
We do currently have a doctor shortage in my province and I myself do not have a family doctor, which does complicate things, but there are clinics around that I can still go to that are just less personal than a family physician.
We do have to pay out of pocket for prescriptions, but generally speaking the cost for most things are pretty low. There’s also a whole bunch of basic I also have 80% drug coverage through my employer, which is pretty common as well. In addition in my province a lot of diabetes medication is provided free of charge.
The day I have to watch ads is the same day I stop youtube. So far ad blocks seem to work well for now and I’m more than willing to spend hours getting them working if needed.
I assumed it was a Patreon because of the name, but its still a for profit company asking their customers for donations in the form of a monthly subscription so they can sell you more games. You don’t get anything tangible out of it, just a private Discord and a badge on your name.
Its skeezy no matter how you spin it.
Gog has been my preference for a few years now, but there’s no way I’m subscribing to a patreon that gets me literally nothing. I honestly assumed at first you’d get something out of it at first, like a free game from the preservation program every month or something similar to Amazon Prime’s giveaways. Its honestly cause me to start to re evaluate how much I purchase from them. Its kinda skeezy.
Its the best way. Its cheaper, you have plenty of user reviews to check first, and you get a completed game, without bugs.
AAA games are just too expensive and many are just not finished at release now. I’m not forking out top dollar for a half finished game. Outer Worlds 2 is still $89.99 CAD. That is absolutely insane in my opinion. I enjoyed the first one, but I also bought it on sale. Indy games nowadays are generally a better bang for your buck anyways and theyre only $30-40 regular price and they are also generally at a finished state or at the very least very honest about the state they are in.
I’ll probably pick the game up in 2 years when its $20 on Steam or something.
Or not a teenager worried and stressed out about how and when to talk to their parents or something.
I understand why he did it that way, but I completely disagree with the assessment that was all an end user should do after installing a fresh is on a new PC. Whenever I start up a fresh install of Windows or Linux I always make sure everything is working properly before I really do anything else. Is my GPU working properly, is my printer working, can I hear sound, etc. I just assumed that was standard.
I have a few dozen epic games, but I have never once bought anything from the store. I probably never will also. Not even dlc’s for the free games i got. I have repurchased free epic games i like on other stores like steam and gog though. I think its the vibe that epic radiates. Also it really does seem to take much longer to download games on epic.
I went myself about ten years back when I worked for a small electronics store. It was literally 70% slop and 20% cell phone cases. There was only one company there that we actually got excited about and looked at bringing in their products. Their products were much better than what we currently carried and our current supplier was a pain in the ass to deal with.
They were imeadiatly bought out and closed by the company we already dealt with before we could even place an order. We only ever received a demo unit.
Probably. Its most likely going to look like the steam machine except it’ll run on win11with an Xbox gui instead of linux. Probably be quite locked down in regards to software and store access as well.
I’ve only used KDE until recently because it’s pretty familiar feeling after coming from windows, but my wife recently put gnome on her laptop and she loves it. I’ve used it a bit, and besides just being unfamiliar I do actually like it.