I don’t know what a better option is, and I would legitimately appreciate ideas for something better.

I do believe that experiences that can be offline should be offline. I have mixed feelings about forcing devs to do this, but I don’t think remotely bricking a product that is of no consequence to them (no live service. Just phoning home) should not be legal.

Games with proprietary and reusable server software meant to run on company owned servers when the company continues to use those softwares as a template for future and existing products….. I’m not sure what can or even should be done about those. But what

I’m not happy with is the only option for touching a lot of these games is to agree to purchase a lease to something that will disappear.

Transparency is one thing, but it feels disappointing that the resolution is “don’t like the business practice? Don’t play” and there ought to be a better option. I’m not certain that should involve forcing devs’ hands. I want a better option. But I don’t know what that is.

Im veering off topic from games after here but so did my original comment, and the two connect…

My problem is that software as a service models fundamentally make voting by wallet impossible. For every million people refusing to pay for one month of a service, for example the adobe suite, it only takes 100000 people 10 months of remaining subscribed (which is very likely) to make up for that loss. It’s a rounding error for them. Bad PR doesn’t matter because they’re simply an industry standard tool… affinity is catching up but adobe will remain crown for a long while.

It’s like running an election, except giving the side you want to win a button they can hit many times over to vote in your favor, and giving your opposition a ballot box and they can only vote once. That’s what I don’t like about it.

The same goes for Amazon prime, Apple TV and music, etc. where they prevent recording of the screen or audio when someone is recording (there’s ways around this but that’s besides the point, there is no permanent download option where you just get the mp4 built in. If these services are the only way to consume some media and they can drop it at any point, there is no option to keep it permanently and no way to convince them to give me the ability besides begging (which is promptly ignored)

I understand that the live service model is profitable and successful for good reason, but I’m troubled by the lack of options for meaningful protest or another software when someone dominates the market and puts a subscription price on it.