Google Chrome and "Enhanced Ad Privacy".
That won't destroy their community.
edit: Because people who use chrome, doesn't care about privacy, freedom or anything like that.
Zoom: "wE cAnT cOlAbOrAtE iF wErE nOt In PeRsOn. We NeEd EmPloYeEs To ReTuRn tO tHe OfFiCe."
They have stiff competition but this has to be one of the most incompetent boners I have ever seen pulled by a major corporation. Stating very clearly to the entire world that you have no confidence in your own product. If Eric Yuan (Zoom's CEO) wasn't the principle shareholder he probably would have been fired out of a cannon by now.
Literally every company is doing this. There was a time when, for example, Apple could reverse engineer the Word document format and make their own word processor that uses them. This was very common and resulted in things like IBM PC clones that sped up innovation.
Now companies use litigation and corporate buyouts to reduce their competition, then set up ways to extract rents on customers rather than providing a service. Business folks love this because it means a consistent stream of revenue that won't go away. And now you've got carmakers looking to charge by the month for features.
For more details, read Chokepoint Capitalism.
And now you've got carmakers looking to charge by the month for features.
When I reach the point at which I am forced to buy a car like that, I'd just find out from where the feature gets controlled and hack in my own controller and a good 'ol switch.
Right now it's your right to do what you want to your car as long as it still passes vehicle inspection, but it appears that car makers want new laws that prevent you from modifying your own car.
If we just sit on our hands now, well likely move into a future where we will be forced to either pay subscription or take public transit, which requires subscriptions.
Microsoft. They've been itching to go to a fully cloud-dependent subscription-only model for Windows for a while now.
I could've sworn that they said win 10 was going to be the last windows and it would just receive updates.
the surprising thing there isn't that they went back on their word, but that they said it in the first place.
Seriously, how could an OS company seriously believe they'd never need or want to release a new major version
Yeah then MacOS 11 came out after 20 years. The idea was to have the same version number for the dumb dumbs. It's why the Xbox 2 was called Xbox 360 so it'd match PlayStation 3, but bigger.
This is a turning point and I'm here for it
~~Twitter, Reddit, Facebook~~ => Fediverse
~~Unity~~ => Godot
~~AAA Studios~~ => Indie devs
Enshittification
What'd Blizzard do?
Well this year was overwatch 2, which was pretty much the same game but wrapped in skeezy monetization, with the excuse that they needed to drop a sequel (and delete the original) for their new PVE content. Then a few months later, they announced they weren't even going to do the PVE content, but they were keeping the new monetization.
Twitter Reddit Unity Blizzard Microsoft Epic Google All of the Movie industry. All of the animation industry. All of the Gaming publishers.
Basically, everything, everywhere.
You forgot car companies asking for subscriptions to use your heated seats.
"Why don't you pay for every damn bullet you fire in the game you fucking peasants!!??" -Unity CEO
That's EAs former CEO lmao
Unfortunately and admittedly, we are the problem. These companies know that people pay for convenience and stick to what they know. If we were less likely to do so companies would have to raise their standards. Take Twitter for example, even with Musks over inflated numbers other sources indicate there's still hundreds of millions of Twitter users. They see all of the things Musk has done and it hasn't buried his business thus they are now taking pages out of his book.
Red Hat (Enrerprise Linux) & HashiCorp (Terraform) closed the source of their products in different ways, also fucking over their community of clients and contributors, though their reasoning seems slightly more sane than "no more free money, aaargh!"
Companies can no longer continue to grow through innovating their products or services. Companies are no longer competing in that domain because they have already conquered it completely.
Companies can no longer grow through marketing and branding. Branding is everything and everywhere now, even normal people have personal brands, they have already conquered that domain and most people have grown to disdain marketing and branding so its less effective than ever.
Companies can no longer grow through data collection and advertising. All data is collected, ads are everywhere and they are always listening to everything we say and do. They have already conquered that domain.
Now all that's left is competition through exploitation. It's the only way companies can continue to grow. That is the stage of capitalism we are entering.
Okay wait what the fuck is this picture
I don't know, but the guy is having a hard time.
Why is this a trend?
Twitter, Reddit, and Unity have not been profitable. This was fine when money was cheap (near zero interest rates). The market was awash with capital trying to find something that could turn a profit. A business plan that was basically underpants gnomes (1. Gather underpants 2. ???? 3. Profit!) was acceptable. Twitter’s and Reddit’s 1. was “gather users”, Unity’s “gather projects”. Now money isn’t free anymore, and capital is demanding that these businesses fill in 2. with something. Twitter is doing whatever Musk thinks is good, Reddit is trying to monetize its API to make AIs pay and to serve real users ads through its first party app, and Unity is trying to monetize the projects it has gathered. All of them have been offering a product below cost, and users are understandably angry that the cost is going up. (And in many cases, finding that the product isn’t really worth anything.)
Blizzard is different. It operates in a creative field and has been very profitable. Games are art as much as they are products that are sold. As such, they’re fickle: you can’t assembly line manufacture games and make a hit after hit. Artists in music that turn out bangers decade after decade are rare, as are authors, directors, etc. Blizzard’s streak of awesome games was bound to end eventually. AAA games are also extremely expensive to make: if you make an AAA game, it must be a hit or you’ll lose money. Alternatively, you can use dark patterns to monetize it, then it doesn’t have to be as good to make loads of money. Banking on your creatives to keep beating the odds is risky; infesting a good enough game with scummy monetization is a safer bet.
You’re spot on. The changes we’re seeing are seen as “radical”, as users had previously utilized them on the cheap. Given the recent changes in the overall market, shareholders are making radical demands. So companies have to think of something to pivot.
When we look at video games, we’ve seen micro transactions creep up, a slow boil if you will, so consumers have adjusted to the increases in these “optional” purchases. Video games overall have been largely stagnant in terms of price per copy. Even accounting for inflation, we’ve really only seen a 20 dollar increase over the years for the raw “license” of a game. Then you add in premium packs and other “optional” nonsense and most have just accepted it.
I think where people get heartburn on these things is when you introduce such a whiplash of a change with such short notice. I think even if Unity changed the pricing to 2 cents an install starting 2024, then upped it to 5 cents in 2025 and kept it at an incremental increase, it would have been a better “slow boil.” By going outright with the 20 cents per install for the entry level, the market reacted just as radically as the proposed changes.
While I don’t personally agree with the changes, I can understand through your point why they’re trying it. Late stage capitalism and all that
It varies from company to company, but when infinite growth becomes unrealistic they get desperate for new revenue and start doing shitty nickel and dime tactics.
More specifically for Reddit thoughts are they realized that these new AI tools had already pilfered all of “their” content and they did not see a cent from it and responded wildly.
Not only Infinite growths, but infinite money. Since at least 2008, money was almost free for tech companies and somehow nobody cared, that they never made any profit - Twitter had like 2 profitable quarters in its entire history.
Now that interest rates went up, investors want to see results and if you can't burn through venture capital anymore, you have to get money somewhere else.
companies want to go back to feudalism
This is such a fucking post. Activision-Blizzard is drowning in cash because people continue to buy their garbage. Diablo Immortal was a great move. OP is completely clueluess.
I heard Plex has something going on so people are switching to Jellyfin
Literally every top 500 company
Companies be like:
i fear mozilla may be in the line here, finally giving-in to google on manifest 3's limitations, web 'drm', and targeted ads program, in exchange for keeping the lights on (google is their single biggest source of funding via payment for being default search).
I see literally no incentive for them to limit their API to just the Google version of Manifest v3. If I recall correctly they already expanded their implementation to offer more.
If they ever implement WEI (the "web DRM") then it's because the Internet forces their hand. A web browser is only as useful as the websites it can browse. If our banks will demand WEI support Mozilla doesn't have much choice. We need to worry about the website providers changing the web, not Mozilla adjusting Firefox to these changes. In the latter case it's already too late and it's hard to blame Mozilla at this point.
