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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • the music streaming platforms basically screw over the artists to make that feasible, with the excuse usually being that artists can make their real money touring and selling merch.

    the cost of producing music is also infintesimal compared to that of producing film and television. the whole music industry itself is pretty small in comparison, yet Spotify costs about as much as a streaming TV service.

    to scale that model up to film and TV would mean either a much higher base price, or a lot less overall content being made. these are viable paths, but both come with big trade offs.



  • this doesn’t really answer my questions, though.

    netflix was able to afford that much content back then for two reasons

    1. they were flush with capital from investors, spending more money than they were making to promote growth.

    2. netflix wasn’t running new content, they were essentially licensing “reruns” of content that already had its primary run elsewhere.

    basically, everyone got used to a certain lifestyle being subsidized by cheap capital and investors misplaced belief in perpetual growth. nobody has yet to explain to me how this could have been made sustainable.


  • the problem i have, that nobody has been able to really explain to me, is how the economics of streaming should be made to work.

    content is insanely expensive to make. even with all of Netflix’s recent shitty changes, their operating margin is still only about 13%. that isn’t enough cash left over to fund production of every single show they don’t have. and it’s important that they actually be able to fund production, because unlike 10 years ago, most productions no longer rely on first runs on OTA or cable TV to make their money

    so it seems to me there are three paths here:

    1. the industry puts everything on a single service and dramatically increases the base price (remember cable? my parents paid twice as much for it in 2005 as i spend today on streaming services)

    2. the industry puts everything on a single service and dramatically scales back production (remember OTA TV?) to fit within the budget afforded by a reasonable subscription price

    3. studios branch off into competing streaming services

    i’m not trying to start a fight or defend shitty corporate behavior (no one will ever get me to pay for ads), i just want to know how people think this could work in a way that balances out






  • Let’s put it another way.

    When I buy a new product, I’m paying for everything that comes inside the shrink wrap, case included. Once you open that case, the case is used. It is no longer in brand new mint condition.

    If GameStop had a reputation for taking care of their open boxes and ensuring that they were in as close to mint condition as possible, I probably wouldn’t care. But they don’t. Every time this happened to me, I got a scuffed up case covered in hard to remove stickers. In some cases, you end up like OP and pay the full new price for a bare disc with no original case or manual. The fact that you are OK with that is astounding.

    Why are you so eager to defend shitty behavior that only GameStop engages in? Are you just completely oblivious to the fact that many people who still buy physical games want to keep the packaging in good condition?