Yeah, I was.

You do realise that long ago MSFT switched from being a desktop software company to cloud and telemetry, right? Win10 and Win11 were free, and Azure isn’t exactly driving them into the ground.

For quite some time, I’d watch YouTube playthroughs of about an hour and realized that in most cases, that was all I really needed. If shit starts looking grindy in an hour, you likely made a bad game.

I’m grateful for these streamers. They save me from wasting money.

You think they don’t want it there?

I never quite got the idea of music streaming. Maybe I’m just too old (yells at cloud), but I listened to radio shows (online) to discover new music, then downloaded it. In the era of mobile data, this seems to have been a solid choice.

I struggle to hit my 5GB data limit by a large margin … adding a streaming service and then having to upgrade my plan because of it sounds like throwing money away when I spend less a month on new tracks than Spotify costs.

There’s been some weird conditioning going on over the years with younger generations that it totally makes sense to just throw a lot of money every month at things that have cheaper, easily accessible one-time solutions. Just because you can’t buy a house doesn’t mean you should rent everything else.

Hell … I was born in the '70s, and the last time I had cable was when I lived with my parents. “Let me get this straight … you want me to pay usurious prices because there’s no way to avoid ESPN being bundled in and then trump it with ads?”

As a rule, if it has ads, I won’t pay for it (I was fine with it back in print days, as they were paying my salary on the other side of the hairline). That’s what the advertisers should be doing. You’re charging the customers too much and the advertisers too little if this is the equilibrium that makes line go up while taking money that customers could have had to spend on the advertised products.

Let’s say cable prices dropped to $20 per month. I’d imagine you’d get those ads in front of far more eyeballs, so increased ad rates would actually be beneficial. But let’s not bring logic into capitalism.

My taste in games is somewhat different. I don’t look for storylines; I look for games with tremendous replay value like Factorio (which has the added benefit of endlessly being able add mods and start a totally new experience). I got it early enough – coincidentally because of an Ars review – that it was still just $20.

Some 800 hours later, that makes it 2.5 cents per hour for entertainment. And I’ll likely get the update pack when I have sufficient hardware, but I get that many popular games are more like books. I don’t tend to reread one as soon as I’m done, but in a few years, I might get a wild hair.

There’s always the option of just scrolling past if you’re sick of the coverage. I’m not on any other instances, and this hadn’t been posted on Beehaw yet. Bee Nicer.

If that first line is your takeaway, you clearly didn’t actually read my post, in which I said my last console was an SNES.

So to presume my knowledge of modern consoles and belittle me because you’re wrong … breathtaking. I’ve no interest in a Switch. I posted this not because it has any chance of affecting me but because it seemed like news people who might want a switch could use. That’s the purpose of a news-aggregation site.

What I took away from the story is that they’re still going to sell cartridges, but the games won’t actually be on them … they’re essentially bulky, overengineered QR codes to be able to download the game you just bought a physical copy off. So, services gone? Congrats on your useless $80 piece of plastic.