I suppose the significance is that this is the 10-year anniversary (to the month) of this dystopian meme. While we fortunately haven't gotten to that point of corporate enslavement, it does feel like society has shifted increasingly in that direction since 2013.
I literally just saw a BMW advertisement yesterday that says it comes with 8 years of adaptive cruise control/driver assist, which then disables itself after the timer runs out (presumably unless you pay to license it again).
For a while now, the KTM motorcycle company has been selling bikes with a Demo Mode.
For the first 1,500 km, you get access to all of the electronic features of your new bike; then they get disabled and you have to pay to re-enable them.
It’s a little worrying that your anti-lock brake subscription might be cancelled due to credit card fraud, but what can you do? That’s I always prepay my DocWagon account.
If it's relying on something like detailed maps or something that need to be updated I could understand that; it costs money to rescan and keep that data up to date. If it's just the basic vision/radar adaptive cruise that's terrible like their heated seats.
I bet it's the worse of those two things, knowing BMW.
The argument is about harm to the general populace, not about harm to a specific group they dislike.
Are indoor smoking bans good? The justification is that second-hand smoke has significant negative impacts on the general populace.
Are tabacco taxes good? They encourage the same thing that smoking bans do, a reduction in smoking leading to better health for the population.
The parent commenter is just saying the same applies to cars. Cars cause a huge number of deaths, especially of pedestrians and cyclists, but also of other car users. They harm the general populace. Just like existing in the same room as someone smoking has health consequences for you, living in the same city as cars increases your chance of death.
You can, of course, legitimately argue that capitalist competition isn't the right way to discourage it, but rather having the government levy additional taxes and fees would be better.
People should be free to drink, smoke, drive, and whatever else is "harmful" if they want. Part of freedom is tolerance for others doing things you don't like. Otherwise we're headed for authoritarian dystopia.
> Are tabacco taxes good? They encourage the same thing that smoking bans do, a reduction in smoking leading to better health for the population.
As a smoker, that is absolute bullshit. Exhorbitant tobacco taxes only piss off people who are going to buy the product anyway. They disproportionately punish poor people for being poor, and they don't put as much of a dent into the amount of smoking that happens as you think they do.
The end result is the same number of cars, that all have built in features that no one pays for and uses, causing more resource usage and waste but providing no one any value. It just hurts the environment but doesn’t convince anyone to switch away.
I think I am in a minority group of 1 for thinking that features that are payable extras are a good thing, actually.
I guess people who don't like it see it as losing features, and talk about _owning_ their vehicle, where I see it as the ability to fine-tune the cost of a vehicle depending on what features you do or do not want to license. With any luck, competition should end up giving a market price to each of these features, and you can just pay market price for what you want/need. In addition, the car should be easier to re-sell, as any options you cheaped out on, a secondary buyer can pay for if they want them.
It's 8am, your alarm clock doesn't wake you up. You've run out of alarm credits again. They're cheap, but you have to refill them every month because the refill site wants to show you ads first.
You wake up late at 9:15, you're glad for the extra rest, but you won't make as much money today because you will get in late. On the other hand, you avoided the worst of the surge pricing for your shower.
You're finally ready to leave. You order your autonomous taxi and are given a choice of which navigation engine to use. You don't pay for UberPremium, so it's an extra $5 to unlock the Waze Ultra traffic avoidance system for the ride. Yesterday you chanced it with the free nav, and got stuck in traffic for an extra hour.
On the ride you pull out your laptop and connect to the in-car wifi. Within a couple minutes your free DNS requests are used up. You can either watch an ad to continue, or buy more dnscredits. It's only $5 for a thousand more credits, that should last you through Thursday.
Ha! Strong Libertarian Police Department [1] vibes.
Ironically, the New Yorker website has an illegal-in-the-EU cookies modal, then a delay and a manufactured-urgency "flash sale!" pop-up that turns into a "you're on your last article" banner.
In this example the alarm clock was free, the taxi was cheaper if you didn’t care how fast you got there, and yes, most people pay a subscription for mobile data already
Ha ha ha, "market price". As if market forces don't simultaneously collude on prices while blowing smoke up the ass of its customers. Everyone knows that inflated "market price" is the result of a lifetime of commercial brainwashing done on buyers. There will never be a fair "market price" as long as everyone keeps raising their prices because reasons.
Why not? Your floor is the base cost of the BOM. Since they absolutely and pathetically have to prioritize shareholder value there is strong impetus to drive prices up or extract additional value some other way. Remember if you're not showing cancerous levels of growth you are dying, if not worthless!
The only time prices ever come down is when one tries to undercut the other, or they feel they can make more money by lowering them. This rarely happens in any permanent or consistent fashion, barring exceptional circumstances or a collapse in demand.
Add in inflationary pressure, and exec's pathetic desire to be cool and copy what their competitors are doing (who cares why? AcmeCo has it, we need to have it to!!!) and you don't even need a price cartel because everyone is making the same sad little moves independently.
The conspiracy aspect is absolutely a red herring. Nobody is that smart, thankfully. This is all supposedly rational actors acting in supposedly rational self-interest. AKA "Market forces"
I don't think any used car buyer will install additional feature in a car. Maybe a new car radio, but even that has become difficult. In our 2nd gen Berlingo the radio is connected to the multimedia "lever" and the digital dashboard ... the aftermarket radio that worked fine in the previous car does not even use the same connectors :-/
IMO the whole purpose of aftermarket radio was going to be multi-cd players, mp3 cd players, or an aux port to connect your own player, but last I went car shopping everything I saw had Android/iPhone bluetooth support that included audio and google maps/waze good enough that I can't imagine anyone wanting to replace it.
How is there going to be any competition or market price for "key to unlock BMW seat warmers". Unless you mean among the mechanics that will jailbreak your car and activate that feature.
Sure, but this is a pretty well-established model for computers; if it's more economical for the company to install the hardware on every model, but only charge consumers who want to utilize it a premium, then I don't see the problem. Price competition should keep the market price for any feature reasonable.
Features that are locked off permanently are less scummy. It's a bad way of emulating different production lines, but at least it doesn't let them charge ongoing rent.
If I am not mistaken sometimes this is due to yield rates in chip manufacturing. Iirc there were 3 core pentiums at some point that were basically faulty 4 core chips where one core did not pass QC.
This is extremely common on CPUs and GPUs. gx104 from Nvidia was famously identical to gx100 with cache, cores fused out, probably because they were defective. It's a good way to increase yield for monolithic dies.
Often times though, the cores are fused because they are malfunctioning. If the option is between that and just getting rid of the CPU, I'd rather they do that.
It's heavily implemented in Cisco and juniper routers for serious ISP applications. In addition to yearly paid support contracts for operating system updates.
You’re not fine tuning the cost. Your paying full price and a reoccurring monthly price. That full price will never go down. It won’t be less expensive than last year’s new car without a subscription model.
This is a suckers game. There are zero upsides to the consumer.
All those features significantly increase repair costs because of the parts and calibration required. Should I have to incur those costs so the manufacturer can extract value from a second owner?
I promise the car will be harder to resell once the warranty runs out. No one wants an old car that’s super expensive to repair, especially if they’re paying to repair things related to features they can’t even use.
yeah, but the extra features don't cost extra money for the manufacturer. For example, BMW sells a subscription for heated seats. But... EVERY BMW has the hardwere in place, seat heaters and everything installed on the car, even if you don't have the subscription. it's not some cost savings passed on to you, it's cheaper for them to put seat heaters in every car!!! They're just going to charge you more to unlock it. Hence, subscription services are not value added, they are value extracted, and understanding that difference is what drives the outrage here.
To provide some historical context for this meme, the Xbox One had recently been unveiled and at the time was going to have a mandatory Kinect. It was rumored that the camera would be un-disableable and on at all times.
The "User attempting to steal online gameplay" bit came from Cliff Blezinski et al saying that splitscreen multiplayer and co-op was a mistake, because half the people who played didn't pay for the game. In the past ten years we have seen local multiplayer evaporate.
> In the past ten years we have seen local multiplayer evaporate.
Split screen multiplayer evaporated for many reasons. Besides business it's also technology.
I'm not sure you'll find a single indie split screen multiplayer game that uses a modern, queued graphics pipeline (Unity HDRP or Unreal 4+). Even among big commercial games, Fortnite notably supports 2 player split screen, but Rocket League, Borderlands and Gears of War are all Unreal 3 I think.
Local multiplayer is back thanks to Steam and their "Remote Play Together" feature. Remote players connect to the hosts screen share. It is excellent. No extra licenses required.
The Kinect Azure is pretty badass. I see why they would say that and it is very funny. I work in computer vision and NUI R&D and it's really hard to understate the accomplishment that is Kniect. I get why most people don't want to play dance games and don't like the machine looking at them but it is REALLY hard to package up solid solutions for the problem the Kinect solves and the Azure and surprisingly it's cross platform SDK are IMO one of the most beautiful tools every produced by humans.
Then you'll love this project. The Holographic demo supports the Looking Glass display and I'm pretty sure natively supports the Kinect Azure but also works with a webcam.
I have been trying to hook a client on a useful demo to get someone who is not me to spring for that big display. Lol. The portrait is like $300 though and it looks good on that.
I remember them being both around the same time. Was looking like we were on the verge of some absurd tech dystopia. Which was partially true, but it wasn't as weird as always on kinect and the mcdonalds patent.
Ironically when I try to open this page I'm IP blocked for using an ad blocker (actually I thought that was the joke at first):
Blocked IP Address
Your current IP address has been blocked due to bad behavior, which generally means one of the following:
You have been using Opera or Brave as a browser, or have installed the Ghostery add-on, and are unaware that these programs are hijacking your Internet connection for their own purposes
Note I'm just using plain old Chrome + Ublock Origin
I thought games were supposed to be fun and entertaining. If the developer makes it un-fun, then why keep playing? why not finding something else fun to do? e.g. play another game? learn a new skill? do something IRL? etc.
The theory outlined in Glued to Games (Ryan & Rigby, 2011) suggests that games we perceive as “fun” are actually satisfying our basic needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness.
If you satisfy your need for competency by playing video games and don’t get that need met anywhere else, then you’ll keep coming back, despite the developers trying to squeeze money out of you every time you log on.
> If you satisfy your need for competency by playing video games and don’t get that need met anywhere else, then you’ll keep coming back,
A different way to look at it is that my selfless dedication to video game KDR is helping to save other players from addiction, by eliminating their feelings of competency.
When it comes to anti-consumer actions taken by companies, many times one can take a blind eye to it as long as they can still play the game.
The problem is that’s it’s like a frog in boiling water. At some point you realize that you need to give your email, phone number, credit card info, money, advertising attention, and more just so you have the privilege of downloading their special launcher that is the only one that can run their game, which of course also requires you to install a root kit in your system for “anti-cheat”.
Only for you to open the game, which requires you to have internet, just to be able to play a single-player game mode.
The game’s fun though. And it only takes 5 seconds to actually load it up once you’ve downloaded everything and installed it. So it’s fine, right?
Consider it just like other software like Microsoft Windows. “It’s supposed to make your life easier, so if it doesn’t, why not just stop using it?” Because it still does make it easier, even with all of the crap that Microsoft does that we can rightfully complain about.
Perhaps also consider it like Twitter. Why stay if it’s so toxic? Because everyone is on there, and if you aren’t, then you’ll never talk to your friends, since it’s not like they’d move platforms just for your sake.
This is besides your point on anti-consumer practices, but games aren't solely for "fun".
Art is about experiencing something, a sad documentary, a tragic movie, a horror movie aren't "fun" in the candy and rollercoaster sense, games are the same.
One that speaks to me, I really enjoy factorio, but I wouldn't call it "fun".
For the core of your point though, getting locked into something because it's how you socialise, (whether directly with friends, or indirectly with a community), or via abusing addictive characteristics in consumers, games can still retain a base even without providing value like my other examples.
One big difference between now and back in the day is the prominence of professional gaming leagues. It's not just about stomping noobs for bragging rights; it can be a genuine dream for people like becoming an NBA star.
I know a guy who destroyed several friendships because he believed he could go pro in League of Legends.
Going to festivals is fun but requires long journeys carrying lots of heavy things and those generally are not very fun, especially on the way home.
The point of the meme is to mock the gates and hurdles you encounter in trying to get to the fun, not the fun itself.
For example, Microsoft potentially requiring people to have an always-on camera pointed isn't something that anyone wants, but they might tolerate it to play FortNite/whatever.
From the timestamps, I guess that this blurb[0] dates from the tail end of the DRM wars[1]. It's fascinating how the enshittification of various online services have led to a resurgence of that era's anti-establishment attitudes.
[0] possibly copy-pasted from an earlier 4chan post? The language style certainly seems to match.
I'm almost certain it's a 4chan "greentext" originally, yes.
It's from the time around the introduction of the Xbox One, which, as one of many policies for the console that were unpopular and ultimately rolled back before release, was going to require the Kinect camera to be plugged in for the console to function.
By this time there was already a well-known Black Mirror episode out involving computer vision tracking to ensure people really watched ads, so these ideas were floating around in the culture. As well as Sony's "say McDonald's to end the ad" patent surfacing around that time.
The xkcd comics you link to would have been quite a few years earlier... the reference to Sony then probably more for the controversy with the rootkit on their CDs, as well as their efforts to lock down Blu-ray discs.
>By this time there was already a well-known Black Mirror episode out involving computer vision tracking to ensure people really watched ads, so these ideas were floating around in the culture. As well as Sony's "say McDonald's to end the ad" patent surfacing around that time.
In addition, Microsoft actually filed a patent for a system that would use the Kinect to track how many people were in the room when watching rented movies, and upcharge you if you exceeded a certain number of people.
Unique unlock code at the bottom of each can? Some kind of scannable QR code or NFC system? They do not care if you dump the ooze into the toilet, so long as it has been purchased.
You could even region lock the cans! Make sure nobody is trying to cheat you by purchasing wholesale or across the border.
Edit: You could even make them like some kind of Nintendo Amibo action figure. Dedicated holder device with API interface to the game.
