For sure

Let's actually look at the economics here instead of just the sticker price. I'm responding to both your original comment and this current one because they're both wild, and how you switch positions so flippantly really shows us a lot, that you have no ideology and as the other user said "fuck you, got mine" is EXACTLY what you're preaching. It's actually ironic you talk about generational wealth while defending your own headstart. But let's break it down.

If it wasn't profitable, these companies wouldn't be pushing subscriptions this hard. That's the whole tell. Companies don't run at a loss for your convenience. The subscription model exists because the math works in their favor, not yours, and it works specifically because the best customer is the one who forgets they're paying. Gym memberships have run on that principle for decades. Now we're doing it with games, with compute, with groceries on payment plans. Lower upfront cost does not mean cheaper. It means the cost gets spread out and obscured long enough that you stop noticing it.

And the trajectory matters more than this year's price. PS Plus has gone up twice in three years. The console itself just had a price hike. Sony's not raising prices because they're struggling, they're raising them because they can, and because hardware ownership is exactly what they're trying to phase out. Jeff Bezos said it outright back in 2024: "You're going to buy compute off the grid. That's AWS." He's not talking about convenience. He's talking about renting your PC. That's the actual stated direction of the industry from the people running it, from the parasite class looking to exploit you, and let's be honest, gaming is often targeted first and operates as a microcosm for society at large in many ways.

Sometimes it's fine to not have access to everything all at once. Sometimes it's fine to save up, buy the one game you actually want, and have more of that money go to the people who made it instead of the platform gatekeeping access to it. And sometimes it's fine to replay something you already own instead of needing a constant firehose of new content. A lot of older games actually said something. A lot of new AAA releases exist purely to funnel you into a storefront for DLC, card packs, battle passes, XP boosters. You're not paying a subscription to play a game at that point, you're paying for the privilege of being marketed to inside it. At some point it's worth asking if you're enjoying the time you're spending or just chasing the dopamine hit of a loot box animation for pixels you don't own and never will.

This isn't hypothetical. Look at what just happened with Halo Campaign Evolved. Local split screen co-op, same couch, same hardware, two controllers, originally required a PlayStation Plus subscription per player just to play the campaign. A mode that should be fully offline. It got walked back after backlash, but the backlash is the only reason it got walked back. Nothing about the initial announcement suggests anyone internally saw a problem until the public did. And even after the correction, both players still need online accounts to play split screen locally. The frictionless drop in drop out couch co-op that existed for decades is already gone. The paid version was just the test balloon to see how far they could push it. Test the extreme version, walk it back partially when people get angry, keep the version that's still worse than what existed before, call it progress. Pushing the envelope, as the parasite class always has. Just how much are you willing to spend before it's too much? The DMCA fight over things like Slopsmith runs the same mechanism from a different angle. You buy a song file, you own that file, and the law still lets a company nuke an open source project for letting you access content you already paid for, because access was always the thing they wanted to control, not piracy.

Now, on "I could really care less if I own these games, I have my collection of the past": that's the part worth sitting with. Because when it got pointed out that this attitude is basically fuck you got mine for everyone who didn't get in early enough or can't afford inflated collectible prices, the response was to flip to nihilism. Suddenly none of it matters anyway because once you're dead whoever inherits it will just sell it for nothing. That's not a rebuttal, that's being a spineless coward. You can't simultaneously say you'll cherish your collection and that it's worthless the moment you stop being the one holding it. Pick one.

And the comparison to being blamed for your parents buying a house for 10k isn't what anyone said. Nobody's invalidating your opinion because of when you were born. The point is that you had decades to build a library while ownership was still the default, you're not buying much new anymore because you already have that backlog, and you're fine with a model that denies that same option to everyone coming up now who doesn't have your head start. That's not about your age. That's about being comfortable with a door closing behind you that you already walked through. You're happy to pull the ladder up so no one else can enjoy the benefits. Just like housing. Just like car ownership.

None of this works without people continuing to pay for it. Every subscription dollar is a vote for this being the permanent shape of the industry, and right now it's an industry that's making sure the next generation never gets the option you already used. And you're happy to pull that ladder up. You're smiling as you literally tell us "fuck you, got mine."

So yeah. Fuck you too.

I think the more philosophical issue is that there is a class of people who are the "owners" and a class who are the "users".

The "owners" have a whole ton of power over what we use. When ownership was decentralized, so was the power.

We're talking about games here, but this can generalize to do many other things.