this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2026
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Never paid a subscription in the first place.
How shockingly good for you.
I'm so happy you provided me this great advice in answer to my question.
Maybe you should have subscribed to "How Not To Be a Huge Ass on the Internet Quarterly". A lot of people like it for the pictures, but I read it for the articles.
You trusted your ability to play games to a subscription service that's now a scam at $20/mo. The thing is, it was also a scam at $10, or $5, or "first three months free with Discord Nitro". This is because on the day you finally unsub, your $60/$120/240 a year bought you nothing, while buying games would have left you with a library. Your options post-Gamepass are to buy your games or pirate them. Being on a Mac exclusively, with no access to Windows/Linux based hardware complicates things further. This is the consequence that subscription services and proprietary vendor-locked software have on the hobby. It sucks that you've been personally enshittified on, but there's no "answer to your question" other than "mac kinda sucks for native gaming, and cloud gaming is a scam".
See if you can buy an LCD Steam Deck, I guess? Lotta games run on that. PCs and "cheap" aren't compatible for the foreseeable future. Otherwise, play what native Mac games exist. Look into Mac compatibility layers or VMs or emulators for Windows software. The PS5's bootROM keys just leaked, it's likely that'll lead to a fully cracked console eventually.
You also didn't really ask a question. You asked "how do i make games work with my budget" without any information on what your budget is and which games matter to you. Do you need big fancy graphics games? Kernel anti-cheat games? Do you care if you're playing on low settings and/or 30fps? 1080p? 4k? Your "future of gaming" might be all possible on a used $300 Steam Deck LCD, or might require a minimum buy-in of $3500 with $1000 of it being RAM and $2000 being a GPU. Impossible to know. Your only question was "how do you deal with this" - my answer is "I don't buy apple products or use subscription services".
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