• islandofcaucasus@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    at least with cable you can bundle channels

    For about the same price as it currently costs to bundle all the major streaming platforms. Plus, cable never had anything near the amount of content we have now on streaming.

    I think people who compare cable to streaming don’t remember what it was like before streaming

    • Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      A lot of it is the same we saw with the rise of Steam and the like in gaming

      “People are just looking for a more convenient way to buy games and all this DRM is making it easier to pirate. Steam is awesome, but I might need to play in an airgapped environment in Iraq and steam’s offline mode is bad. So I might as well just pirate everything. Fucking Valve”

      That said: Tinfoil hat and all, but I really do think the increasing rise of “Ugh, this streaming is so expensive and confusing. I should just get cable” is an astroturfing campaign. Because the two big elements of the SAG side of the strikes are streaming residuals and AI. And the advantage of cable tv is that the networks control who get the residuals. Take a look at where the cast and crew of Friends ended up, and you start to get an idea of why TBS will never stop airing reruns of that show. Same for Seinfeld and, to much lesser extents, Frasier and King of Queens and the like.

      Which is why I expect the outcome will be to do hybrid models. And a lot of the current discourse is about making people think they want to have to “record” an episode of Becker rather than just choose to watch wherever they left off as a VOD.

      • jmp242@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        I’m not sure how you mean the last paragraph, but P+ already removed Star Trek Prodigy, and I think it just stopped “airing” so people might rightly want to “record” the show.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        an episode of Becker

        I haven’t seen that show in so long. It was cancelled way too soon. I may have to, um, acquire it…

        • Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          It was a genuinely bad show. But Ted Danson is magical and can make the most unlikable and obnoxious sitcom characters into reflections of the soul that stick with you in ways they really shouldn’t.

          • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I liked it, yes, it was because of Ted Danson. I would watch a show where Becker and Dr. Cox from Scrubs just had a sarcasm-off.

            • Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Same.

              It isn’t the same, but it is well worth catching some Curb Your Enthusiasm clips on youtube. Ted Danson is a recurring character and his interactions with Larry are magnificent.

    • marmo7ade@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      And a lot of PC gamers have Stockholm Syndrome when it comes to Steam.

      Glacially slow and pathetic customer service. They have an F rating by the Better Business Bureau. Offline mode sucks. And Valve bullies developers into agreeing to exploitative pricing terms:

      https://www.eurogamer.net/new-lawsuit-accuses-valve-of-abusing-steam-market-power-to-prevent-price-competition

      You know what would fix this? Competition. But when Epic created a game store and implemented the same tactics that Valve is using - Steam fanboys cried.

      People don’t really care about these issues - they want their “team” to win.

      • dan1101@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Why can we buy games cheaper on other services then?

        Steam works and the prices are good and I don’t see them buying exclusives. That’s good enough for me nothing is perfect.

        • Flaky@iusearchlinux.fyi
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          1 year ago

          GOG is good if the game you want is on there. I got the ultimate edition of Fallout New Vegas for like £5. It was like £10-15 on Steam at the time. Great deal. The main issue is they’re strictly anti-DRM for offline games so the bigger developers are less inclined to put their games on there, but whatever.

        • pizzatime@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          yeah, exclusives are the big one for me. I choose to game on PC because it’s less bullshit. exclusives decidedly fall into the bullshit category and the EGS is full of them

      • Flaky@iusearchlinux.fyi
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        1 year ago

        The way Epic handled competition was by strong-handing exclusives constantly without actually providing a better service. Last time I bought a game from Epic, it didn’t even have a cart system to buy games in bulk. Couple that with the tolerance of cryptocurrency/blockchain and acquisitions of sites like Artstation and Bandcamp, and yeah - people have reasons to not like Epic. I’ve heard stories of people getting locked out of their banks because of the lack of a cart and they were buying a lot of games in a short amount of time. I’ve also heard stories about people’s Epic accounts getting breached because of Fortnite BS.

        And I’m saying this as someone who uses multiple launchers. I hated Steam back in the mid-2010s (skipped the middleman and bought GTAV from Rockstar directly) and they were in quite a bad rut with Steam Greenlight and the paid mods fiasco. People were rightfully loudly critical of Steam and at a time, Valve really did not deserve taking a 30% cut. They’ve done a lot since then to recoup that lost trust and deserve the 30% cut, Proton and the Steam Deck being a massive part of that for many people.

        • Whirlybird@aussie.zone
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          1 year ago

          Last time I bought a game from Epic, it didn’t even have a cart system to buy games in bulk.

          While that seems like a pretty basic feature, I’d wager that they know that people don’t generally buy games in bulk unless they’re free.

      • Whirlybird@aussie.zone
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        1 year ago

        People don’t really care about these issues - they want their “team” to win.

        Yeah the amount of “No steam no buy” fanboys is absurd. They act like having to open a different program to see their games is like hacking into the matrix. Not to mention that there are already programs like GOG Galaxy that compile all of your games from all your services in to one GUI.

        • dlok@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I used to be annoyed about the memory usage of running multiple game launchers but now it’s a bit of a non issue with 32gb ram. I don’t even remember what I had when it was an issue.

      • Pyro@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I’ve had a very pleasant experience every time I’ve talked to Steam Support. What’s so bad about them?