Comment on It’s Surprisingly Easy to Live Without an Amazon Prime Subscription

• abraxas@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  But i doubt it just downloads and that’s it. No tracking? No phoning home? No play-statistics? Hmm

  I can’t be positive. I’ve never run any network traces on it. But it doesn’t have any of the hallmarks of service DRMs. No “connecting” popup. I’ve played Amazon-downloaded games offline. If there’s a hidden DRM, it’s more-or-less obscured.

  Let’s be honest, though. Amazon gives the games away for free in an app that will never be used to sell products; and they do it as a bullet-point for Prime and to nudge people towards Luna. It’s obviously the games they get for free that they give away. I see no reason for them to do more work than they have to, plugging in a DRM.

  But i never heard of anyone actually using the app instead of maybe even playing one of those freebies and then quitting the app again 😁

  It’s hard to remember what games I got through Amazon vs Epic, but I clearly remember a few times I was excited about an Amazon Games offering added an Epic game.

  In Amazon Games natively, my happy games are Autonauts, Terraformers, Close to the Sun (recently), and a few of those short adventure games I completed that nobody wants to spend $20 on but everyone loves to play.

  I tried watching like 3 things. And one i could rent, the others pay extra and i was like “wtf? This is prime? Fuckit”

  Their rent thing sucks, but I *never *see rentals in front of me when I use Prime Video on my TV. I named 3 of their big exclusives, but there’s plenty more either exclusive or just licensed. It’s never the most awesome shows of any service, but I could still find a few hours per day of video if I tried.

  It just sucks that you’d need like 5 services and still can’t watch EVERYTHING

  Yeah, I’m with you 5000% on that. That’s where Gabe Newall is right. I’d probably be willing to drop drop $100/mo or more on a service if it had EVERYTHING on-demand, convenient, with no DRM of any kind. And I’d never once think to download-and-unsub or distribute or anything.

  …as for your experience, I say wave that damn Jolly Roger. Gimme convenience or give me death. I pay because things are convenient for me. If it wasn’t, I probably wouldn’t be paying either.

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  • Dyskolos@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Okay, guess my prejudice about the amazon app was a but premature grounded on misanthropic bitterness 😊 I retract that statement and stand corrected.

    Oh autonauts. This i even bought on steam before it went for free. Still don’t regret. Still can’t recall a game i actually played on epic. Though i gotta admit i bought a looooot of games on steam.

    Hm. Maybe i picked a bad bunch or had bad luck that one time i tried prime. It just never occurred as a prime (no pun intended) reason to pay… Errr… Prime.

    I totally hear you on the convenience-point. Warez were never convenient. Just “free”. Yet, with a tiny amount of “work” (given you’re not a tech-illiterate) the sailing-seas-way is a child’s play nowadays. I enter the name of the series/movie, wait for the download (full speed 24/7)and simply watch it on emby with all comfort there is. From phone, tablet, laptop, desktop… My maintenance-time is below an hour per year (and i even love tinkering). All for below 19 bucks in the quality i prefer.

    Dishing out 100 bucks would need a lot of benefits to convince me. Though i get you. Trading money for tinkering-time. All depends on our preference and skill and nerdiness 😂

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    • abraxas@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      a game i actually played on epic.

      Here’s a few of mine (not sure if any come from Amazon): Control (this was awesome!), shapez (almost bought it, then it was in my inbox), loop hero, Guardians of the Galaxy (Christmas free games), Outer Worlds (ditto), Evil WIthin 1 and 2, most of the fallout games, Death Stranding, Gloomhaven… I’m only on page 5 of 20 lol. Only 1 out of 5 of their free games are any good, but between big giveaways and the like, that’s still ~15 good free games a year lol.

      It just never occurred as a prime (no pun intended) reason to pay… Errr… Prime

      Perhaps THE problem with Prime right now is that none of their services except maybe TV is worth $11/mo on its own. Their free games aren’t Humble Monthly, but HM is just games. Their TV isn’t Netflix, but it’s $4/mo cheaper. You can get free shipping without Prime now (that wasn’t true before), but next day is phenomenal. As for books, there’s not really any replacement I know of. It’s not perfect (has this annoying thing about having books 2 on in some series, without book 1), but if you read a book a month, it pays for itself.

      Warez were never convenient. Just “free”. Yet, with a tiny amount of “work”

      For sure. It’s always been a baseline of convenience. I remember the old days of curating my mp3 collection every 6 months, removing dupes and fixing organizational shifting. But if I do that stuff for apps, I have to maintain freaking sandbox environments for each app, make sure my computer is backed up in case I have to wipe it, make sure nothing auto-logins so a remote attack doesn’t happen, etc. About 1 in 2 cracked apps show up as a virus and you can never know whether it’s a false positive, so you have to use a computer condom and then STILL get tested.

      Dishing out 100 bucks would need a lot of benefits to convince me. Though i get you. Trading money for tinkering-time. All depends on our preference and skill and nerdiness 😂

      I’m in an ok place right now. And Amazon is still the cheapest place to buy anything, for me. If I spend over $1000/yr there on everything, a lot more if you count the holidays, then Prime has already justified itself. And slower or not, Amazon with Prime is STILL the fastest Christmas shipper.

      Anecdote… We bought Ring cameras from the Ring site for a family member in November. By mid-December, they still hadn’t shipped because Christmas orders were so backlogged. So we bought them again on Amazon and they were on our doorstep 2 days later, just a couple days before Christmas. Was it next day? No. Was it worth it? YEAH.

      Then we had to fight with Ring for 2 weeks because they wouldn’t cancel the order. We got the Cameras the 2nd week of January and my wife was on the phone with them 6 or 7 times before they finally approved a return. Amazon has this thing called “Free Returns” on most items. You can literally write in “I was drunk shopping” for your return reason and nobody bats an eyelash.

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      • Dyskolos@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Here’s a few of mine (not sure if any come from Amazon): Control (this was awesome!)

        Aye, i’d second that list! Yet I usually have them on steam before they ever show on epic. So most of my epic-freebies i have twice in my library now. The tool “play-nite” is great for multi-library-gaming btw. includes gog, amazon, itch, ubi, steam, epic etc.

        I remember the old days of curating my mp3 collection every 6 months, removing dupes and fixing organizational shifting.

        Still do that. For over 25yrs I nourish my library. Just the MP3s made room for FLACs.

        But if I do that stuff for apps, I have to maintain freaking sandbox environments for each app

        Yeah ok, I get that. I’ve got 2 servers running 24/7 with proxmox/hyper-v, so those tools all run in seperate VMs. But especially in this case, it’s practically no maintenance. I’m still wondering why it works so flawlessly :-) As to the viral issue…I must say that i’m in the warez-scene since the early 90s and I never had a virus-problem. Ever. Though the majority is pure media, so no problem at all. And even if there should be a problem, I’ve got daily backups of everything. So I just go back to yesterday :-)

        I’m in an ok place right now. And Amazon is still the cheapest place to buy anything, for me. If I spend over $1000/yr there on everything, a lot more if you count the holidays, then Prime has already justified itself. And slower or not, Amazon with Prime is STILL the fastest Christmas shipper.

        Totally worth it in that case. I spend like 600 bucks for a ton of stuff for wifey this xmas, and even though it took them a day longer than usual they all came on point. And prime paid itself quickly. Rest of the year it’s not that much, so I just surf on the usual trial or just use free shipping or just pay 3,99 if need be.

        Then we had to fight with Ring for 2 weeks because they wouldn’t cancel the order. We got the Cameras the 2nd week of January and my wife was on the phone with them 6 or 7 times before they finally approved a return. Amazon has this thing called “Free Returns” on most items. You can literally write in “I was drunk shopping” for your return reason and nobody bats an eyelash.

        Aye, that’s totally my reason to shop at this fucking monster called amazon. No hassles, no worries, you get your crap the day they tell you, if you have ANY problem, you’re helped in 5 minutes at max. Dunno where you’re from, but we call our country “service-desert”. Some might be cheaper than amazon and it’s often tempting (my GPU was 2000,- elsewhere and 3000 on amazon…and i regret not using amazon), but if anything happens, you’re screwed and everything takes forever. Or they charge you extra fees, usage-fees, “this item isn’t defective and will be returned to you at your cost plus fee” etc. You just never have to worry. One gift we needed to return (glass broken), but as it classified as “food-item”, they told us to keep it and it will be refunded. Now we have 2 glass decanter for free instead of 3 for full-price. You won’t see that elsewhere here. No way. First you gotta prove it wasn’t YOU that broke it at home. I could on for hours…

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