Meme: Amphibian creature labelled "Spotify" emerging from a body of water, but being pushed back. Captions read: "Stop them! Don't let a single company rule them all. If you see a Horrid Beast monopolizing, push it back in."
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as well as condemning (their) imperialism, even if it is of the "anti-USA" flavor.
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OP you should make the same meme about Steam right? Never mind that they massively reduced piracy and get creators paid
monopolies are the same as dictators, generally really bad, but a great dictator can get so much shit done and change things for the better much faster than great democracy could (i'm not dictator-apologising here, i'll take democracy any day, just stating a fact here)
This is where I'm conflicted.
I don't use Spotify because I don't believe in ads or paying money for things that are relatively easy to get. Im also not into music, which means my NEED to get anything is pretty low.
Where gaming, Steam is a platform. One could argue the ads are in the store page or all the sales. But there's still a huge pirate community. There's still GoG. All the other drm platforms are miniscule so not going to talk about them.
Where Steam is different is that shit just works on Steam. I can download a game from 2005, install, and I'm at the title screen. If I pirate, I have to do a handful of things to get to the title screen. Same with GoG. My Steamdeck is amazing! I've been actually rethinking building PCs in favor of just getting new Steam Decks.
Well for me the same is with Spotify, I could just download stuff and put it on my plex server, but I just don't feel like bothering with it, we have a shared plan, so it comes out to like 2,75 euros a month to have ad free music, with the very good discover weekly and other auto generated playlists that are mostly a hit for me, if I spend more than 6 minutes a month having to fuck around with my own music setup I am already losing money compared to just working those minutes