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.

How do you discover new music? That's been an issue for me, considering how I don't use Spotify.

This and also the increasing number of adverts/sponsored recommendations and annoying notification for stuff I don't follow.

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.

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...

can respect your perspective about pricing, but do not forget how we "buy" things now. it is just a virtual lease of unspecified duration in reality.

when physical ownership was possible, you could tend to have games that you can use for perpetuity. nowadays, you can lose access to what you buy for arbitrary reasons (see ubisoft example - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40020961).

it then all boils down to similar grounds as mentioned for other media. all the dark patterns, forcing online connection for singleplayer experiences, and intrusive drm really downplays the labour of love argument for me. if it is all for passion for most game devs, they should not seek monetary expectations from their audience, who dedicate thousands of hours to play their works.

it should be well-understood that streaming is not ownership, and it has been an unsustainable business model. but so is owning anything digitally by paying up front. at least the arrangement is more apparent for the former. i personally work on things that can and is pirated, and having been on both sides, i would not demonize one.

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.

> 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?

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.

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

How do you pirate songs these days?

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.

Then there's two of us

Did you use a DisplayLink hub per chance? This ill-conceived stuff triggers the DRM idiocy.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

Fair enough for most of this, but your last point couldn't be more off. Bootleg streaming sites which I won't name are essentially like Netflix but with everything and for free. They come in high quality, stream without interruptions, offer downloads at high speeds, and can even generate recommendations for what to watch next. The only real caveat is that you'll want to bring an ad blocker. In terms of convenience and quality of service, they win a thousand times over compared to paid services where you have to waste time logging in only to learn that the second season of the show you wanted to watch is actually on a different streaming service now.

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.

Legally, you are allowed to sell the license (at least in Germany). We need to force distributors to give us tools to do it.

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.

> Blu-ray discs of movies, shows and music exist

For now. Everything Everywhere All At Once never got a physical release here in the UK. Considering it won best picture that is insane to me.

Similarly, a lot of prestige shows that are either produced by streaming companies or distributed by streaming companies outside the US never get physical releases.

I’m not saying you’re wrong—you’re dead right—but it bums me out.

GOG doesn't sell most games. I do buy on GOG when possible, but GOG sells a sliver of what Steam sells.

It was a twitter link https://files.catbox.moe/cn6yxg.jpg

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?

The new California law is quite clearly illustrating that what digital stores do is illegal, unethical, and not a voluntary arrangement. When a customer buy a product in a store they expect ownership of the item, not a temporary and limited digital license. Presenting it as a sale is fraudulent and misleading.

If companies don't like it they can "sell" their products in countries without customer protection. No one is forcing them to participate in the market.

> 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.

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.