There’s indeed quite an uproar and I’m not unsympathetic to it, but only 3% of Sony’s 2025 revenue came from physical game sales.

https://www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/IR/library/corporatereport/... (page 37)

Companies need to earn money, so the only leverage we as customers is to NOT buy their products. Educate our kids that such practices are EVIL and to buy the products it means to support those EVIL practices. Don't be afraid to call upon moral. Kids need to understand moral from the beginning, or they will be corrupted by bad practices.

We’ve been boiled in water like frogs, or however the saying goes. Even cars these days have subscription pricing for features which is insane to me but the average consumer is accustomed to this garbage. If they tried this 20 years ago it wouldn’t fly.

Someone once said that if libraries were invented today they would be illegal and that feels more true every day.

>What's different? How do we get back to how it was before?

Elect people who regulate business and break up closed platforms. That's what different. Happened to TV too. In the early 1980s TV programming was regulated. Program-length commercials were banned, host-selling was banned, etc. Then Reagan put Mark Fowler in charge of the FCC who thought TVs are "toasters with pictures" and the free market should handle it and you got modern ad-infested, anti-consumer TV.

Gaming hardly was ever subject to any rules to begin with because it grew up after that shift. There's no great mystery, you hand your society over to unaccountable megacorporations and the market and you get exactly what anyone on the street would have told you would happen.

> What's different

I think what's different is that there aren't any/many dissenting companies building products without the bullshit.

In the past if consumers didn't like something they could shift their business to another company that wasn't doing that thing. Companies had to compete

I don't think I see much actual competition among companies anymore. They're all just trying to build as much lock-in as they can. For example, I think HP printers don't compete with Brother printers really, they just keep trying to milk HP customers more instead of winning new business.