Re:Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
by nullcaution on Monday December 19, 2022 @02:07AM
(#34049352)
Not really, support for software, especially games are discontinued publicly all the time.
The real rule is not pissing off your customer base by taking important services offline while they still use that particular product. Doing so would be a PR blunder, and obviously effect sales of future products.
Re:Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
by jacobsimon on Wednesday December 21, 2022 @03:38PM
(#34086087)
Sorry I think you misunderstood my point - if you want to continue providing a service to customers that runs online, then a one-time payment doesn’t work as a business model. The fact that they have to shut down game servers is a testament to that problem. At some point the costs exceed the revenue and it becomes unprofitable to honor the lifetime purchase.
Re:Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
by diffeomorphism on Monday December 19, 2022 @02:41AM
(#34049527)
No. If that were true I could simply use spotify or netflix with any software of my choice.
You are paying for both the content and the software bundled together. And no, you don't get it "for free".
Re:Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
by colonwqbang on Monday December 19, 2022 @04:02AM
(#34049995)
But you can, in the case of spotify: https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot
Re:Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
by coldtea on Monday December 19, 2022 @01:35PM
(#34055745)
>for streaming rights to an ever-growing content library
Ever-growing my ass. I've had lots of songs on my playlists removed because they were taken off the platform. And not some obscure acts, for example Westbam's Götterstrasse (which features anybody, from Brian Molko and Iggy Pop to Kanye and Lil' Wayne).
Re:Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
by jacobsimon on Wednesday December 21, 2022 @03:43PM
(#34086142)
Spotify added over 20M new tracks to its library last year.
There’s also an unspoken but important accounting detail here - if you run an online software business and offer a one-time, lifetime purchase for your product, you are now contractually on the hook to provide that service to customers forever, even if your business stops growing, which means that the liabilities of your business are not capped. This is bad if you operate with a lot of cloud expenses, and it means that these businesses are unsustainable unless new customers keep coming in, whereas a subscription model scales with utilization.