I think a common factor on why torrents are having a resurgence and illegal streaming services are getting more traction, is subscription fatigue. Subscription fatigue doesn’t only contain itself to streaming services, movies or music, nowadays you’re also expected to subscribe to every app you download. Whether it’s a meditation app, a budgeting app (looking at YNAB that went from a one-time purchase to a really expensive subscription model), the Adobe suite, the MS Office suite, your Peloton bike that you’ve already paid hundreds of dollars for (referencing the earlier article on them establishing a startup fee for buying used bikes), or a podcast app where the money doesn’t even go to the podcasters themselves.
Is there a peak for this? I feel like subscriptions are becoming more of a rule than an exception. Having the ability to directly purchase digital goods seems more like a thing of the past. It’s just so stupid. But apparently people don’t care? They just keep paying for this? Apparently it’s still worth it for companies to establish a subscription model, even if there are no benefits for the customer, just the company. What are your thoughts? What can we do to stop it?
I know I’m in the minority but I am also a software developer, and I think subscriptions are a much healthier payment model for everyone. The issue IMO is not recurring payments but the total cost of ownership.
“Digitial goods” is very rarely just a thing that you produce once and then it’s done. The OS is regularly updated which causes incompatibilities, app stores introduce new demands, and there’s a constant stream of security vulnerabilities in your dependencies that need to be patched. Failing to adress any of these things breaks the social contract and causes rage among your users (“I PAID FOR THIS, WHY ISN’T IT WORKING/WHY AREN’T YOU FIXING BUGS/etc”). Even movies and music need to be maintained because new media formats are introduced, streaming services have to be kept responsive and up to date etc.
A subscription models the cost distribution over time much better, and it does benefit the users because it means the company can keep updating their shit even if new sales drop, instead of going bankrupt.
I don’t think this stops with just digital goods. Manufactured products (and the environment) would also benefit from a subscription model because it means there’s no incentive for planned obsolescence. It’s an incentive for keeping the stuff we already built working for a long time, instead of constantly producing new crap and throwing the old in a landfill.
But, the caveat is that this shift must not result in higher total cost of ownership for the end users over time. In fact, it should reduce the cost because repairing and updating is cheaper than building new stuff. The way many companies are pricing subscriptions today, they are being too greedy.
I completely agree with you in principle for people who want their software updated, but there is some software that is standalone and doesn’t depend upon changing codecs/APIs etc. Something like myfitnesspal or a thermomix shouldn’t be a subscription, there is no major updates to how someone tracks their exercise uses a hot blender that justifies it beyond users being locked in.
In the example of thermomix, you’ve already paid top dollar for the hardware, getting locked out of functionality you’ve paid for stings.
In the olden days software used to be sold by individual major versions. You paid for version 9, you paid for version 10. Or you skipped versions you didn’t need. You could use versions side by side. The newest installed would import its data from the older ones. etc.
App stores have made this very awkward or almost impossible. There’s no concept of separating major versions. You’d have to buy and install completely different apps to be able to pay for them separately and to use them side by side, but if they’re separate apps they can’t import your data from each other. Not to mention that people seem to hate having “too many apps” for some reason.
Software subscriptions switch the “support per major version” to “support per time of use”. It’s obviously shittier but it’s more realistic than a one-time price and expecting to use the app in all future versions in perpetuity. The one time price would have to be very large to be realistic.
This is an interesting point as well. Before, if you weren’t happy with an update or whatnot, you could just keep running the older version. But nowadays that’s impossible in many cases.