I’ll start: printers.
I bought an HP in March 2020 when my job went remote and HP bricked it remotely after only 100 pages because I wouldn’t sign up for their subscription program. Ended up trashing a perfectly good printer.
Luckily my library’s close by and I can print there remotely.
Yeah, MMOs are a special case. Realistically WoW or XIV are a better deal than most games. I’m probably in the tens of thousands of hours in WoW since 2004. Pretty crazy value for money.
I agree paying for online in consoles is dumb but that’s always been their strategy - cheaper and easier to get into than computers and they’ll nickel and dime you since you don’t know any better.
If you’re a daily player, sure. But I’m the kind of person who can play every day for maybe a week, but then I’ll take a month or four off before I pick it up again. The monthly billing system does not align with how I like to play games.
You can just… cancel the sub…
I’ll take years off between playing for a couple months here or there.
My complaint: I don’t want to pay every month
Your solution: Play for only 1 month
Problem not solved. I’d much rather buy a game where I get to play as long as I want.
Idk man you’re making it out to be a lot bigger problem than it is. There isn’t a single “buy once” game out there that is even remotely close to beating WoW or even XIV in terms of playtime or playtime:cost. As long as you’re having fun playing them and have stuff that you want to do in them, they are essentially an unbeatable value.
Even terraria and FNV don’t come anywhere close to matching the playtime I have in those MMOs, although terraria is so cheap that it probably beats everything on cost value.
Stardew Valley, GTA5, Cities Skylines. All games that you can basically buy once and be done. I can put them down, come back in 2-4 months, and pick up right where I left off.
Also here’s Half Life 2 in a browser: https://hl2.slqnt.dev/