Kind of a contradiction!

I've pirated music, movies and games as well when I had more time than ways to fund my hobby. However, most grow out of that phase and realize it's not only much nicer to own it in physical form but also feels better than de facto stealing.

Subscription services do not encourage that transition, they're designed to get you hooked on them and not let you go, or you collection / play lists / trophies and what not are all gone.

So while it's nice GP is making gaming accessible for people who can't afford to try out many new things, there's no reason to ever move on from subscription services. Which is bad for collectors like you and me. Some stuff will still come out and maybe some things will make a resurgence like vinyl. (I never bought into vinyl, it's not better than CD, CD is better than MP3 though) Most will become harder to get and more expensive. Games will change more towards episodic and evolving game worlds to keep you hooked, but also turn it into keep up or the game will be completely different or even gone when you get back.

As for Kindle, never. I grab a book to get away from screens!

I used to spend over 2K USD on movies, first Laserdiscs, then DVD, then Blu-ray. I bought plenty just to try out. However now prices are up, non mainstream movies are much harder to find or take a long time to order. Renting never interfered with collecting, streaming is putting a huge strain on it. A lot of stores here don't even sell music nor movies anymore. Only specialized stores are left where you pay a premium. And I'm not looking forward to see what's left after this pandemic is over :/ It wouldn't be so bad if Amazon was not also affected, and they also want you to get Prime and go stream.

I know right? But alas, sometimes we like contradictory things. I can't call myself a collector by any means as I don't have enough financial resources to it, I collect what I can afford I abandoned my piracy habits when I get my first full paid job, but it was only 4 years ago and I still pirating some animes and mangas, but mostly because they don't have official release here, but just for the record I have about over 600 different manga volumes and I'm starting to running out of space to put them together lol 

And maybe those 2k a year seems ok-ish for a north American worker from USA or Canada, but I'm just a Brazilian guy, 2k is about the median 6-month income of a Brazilian worker. Unfortunately most of the media I like is from either USA or Asia (mainly Japan and Korea), so accessibility and low price will always be a factor over some of my whims

I can also try to advocate for other fellow producers and consumers from emerging markets! 

With a mass-consumption subscription service companies can try to put more people spending money into a specific hobby because now every penny can produce some value. That's how music industry was saved from the extinction it was heading to, you may reduce the revenue from European, American and Japanese markets (usually the ones that spend a lot purchasing music as well as games, theatrical box office, etc) but otherwise saw a massive increasing in emergent markets Latam, China, Southeastern Asia, India, middle west. Don't think the sudden influx of kpop bands and Latin music flooding Spotify charts are just a circumstances. Today we just saw a Demon Slayer film breaking the record of the highest grossing non-English movie first weekend box office in North America. Ok, Japan isn't exactly an "emergent market" but I think you understand streaming services are making anime even more popular and accessible right? 

Mixed feelings I don't mind subs mixed with other content access options ,but I also detest content that is only accessible by a sub paywall, other downsides are finding your interests/purchases that may add up in some cases to years of not just financial but emotional investment suddenly behind a sub, then there can be the splintering effect of needing multiple subs for items that were once found in one place, another downside is timed availability and also the fact that its likely that the gamepasses of the future will bemade strong enough through locking up content to make it so they can push up the cost while making it the only way to use the platforms.

I don't know. I quit buying anime as it became harder to get here... I wasn't a big collector of it (yet) anyway, got a couple incomplete series, mostly collect movies. However also my anime movie shelf has been static for years. I don't find it in stores anymore, thus no more exposure. I hate browsing menus like Netflix, but would go over shelves in stores / rental places for well over an hour. I loved browsing book stores, amazon selections online have me turned away within minutes. Maybe that's just me, digital menus suck.

Music still makes a lot of money from venues and digital sales. And did streaming really save music?

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/22/technology/streaming-music-economics.html

Shira: How has streaming changed the music industry?

Ben: It’s been the industry’s salvation. Largely because of Spotify and other subscriptions, streaming provided the industry something it never had before: regular monthly revenue.

To oversimplify, the big winners are the streaming services and the large record companies. The losers are the 99 percent of artists who aren’t at Beyoncé’s level of fame. And they’re angry about not sharing in the music industry’s success.

There's you tube at least for the smaller artists, money from ads.

Overall subscription business model comes to destroy some kind of artists who used to have a regular influx of cash: it's the niche artist. It's the singer who never sold million of copies, but could comeback one time every 2 years, release and album and then sell like some 200k-400k and start a niche concert tour for their highly loyal core audience 

With album sales dying their sales numbers went down from 200k to closer to 0 and well, the monthly streams of their core audience won't indeed pay their bills, indie singers and bands more than never need to get mainstream support that's true and that's a shame 

But it's also true music market was never fair not easy in first place and it was always reserved to big players. Just like indie games could never stood a chance against blockbusters indie artists could never compete against major labels when they have almost no radio airplay, no music store space, no TV space and lack every kind of marketing necessary to reach their audience. Remember unlike games we can find a plethora of screenshots and youtube cuts and analysis but music is much harder to advertise without given away your music for free (that's the main purpose of promoting singles). So many indie and rookie singers starting publishing their music completely free exactly because they lack common big promotions venues reserved to major labels 

With streaming those acts have at least a chance to become more well know. I can't stop but act surprised every time an unknow singer I've been listening finally manage to break the mainstream (and that's become fairly common), and that's not because I'm some kind of deep obscure hardcore indie fan, I mostly listen to mainstream pop, rock and hip-hop I just don't mind browsing some unknow artist who just released something and got some praise from reviews. Recently was Kali Uchis, I've listened this girl the first time because she was featured in a random track of a Gorillaz album and love her ever since, listened her music always she drops something and then she just got a hit song some months ago. She's from Colombia and sings mostly in Spanish, I doubt she would have any chance to get attention without Spotify help 

Like many have said very well. I fit into the 30 year old with a collection. I neither have the time to play hundreds of games and the games I want I get day one so gamepass offers nothing to me since third party comes years late. Unless they suck then they make a deal with MS.

I will say that the subs strategy seems to be more reliant on quantity and not quality. Thats soomething that dosent fit with me. Since I have very little time I will only play the best games. As of now MS dosent offer neither quality nor quantity. But their recent adquisitions meane they will probably meet the quantity benchmark. If they somehow by miracle also pump out a lot off good quality games then thats something I could get behind off. But subs don't really work that way.

It's not my cup of tea

I subscribe to PS Now, Gamepass and Nintendo's service just for the old games.

I am currently not subscribed to any gaming subscription services at the moment but I am planning on buying a Series S and subscribing to game pass this year. I think the gaming subscription is a better way to consume digital games as you only ever own a limited license anyway (When the servers go down your games likely aren't playable in any way anymore). I am torn on what it means for physical games and still buy bigger releases physically if I think they will still be valuable to me in the future.

It depends.

- When I was a student, I bought myself a PSTV, which was the cheapest option at the time to play console games (with the Wii Mini). I was like "great, I will play Vita games on my tv", before realizing PS Vita games were expensive, most of the Vita games wouldn't work on the PS TV and it was only limited to 720p (or 1080i). Then I discovered that PS TV could play PS Now, so streaming PS3 games and thus having pretty much a PS3 despite being a very tiny box. I've discovered Uncharted games, Street Fighter, Sonic Unleashed (I wish I hadn't for this one), The Last Of Us, and many more titles, there were like 500 games back then, it was great.

- Now I have 90+ games in my backlog, that's sufficient to make a subscription service on its own. I've subscribed to EA Play for 1 year cause it was the same price as Jedi Fallen Order, but after all I realised EA Play games aren't that interesting, besides Jedi Fallen Order, so now I will lose access to a game I could've bought.


So now I have 2 takes on the matter: it is a great bonus for your console experience, but overall cannot match the great library a console can offer. And since, as Netflix, MS currently wants quantity over quality, I can predict Game Pass will become a trash-game place where untalended devs will throw huge amount of games in it just to have more people playing their games despite being bad.