The Netflix Issue

    Good morning, been a few days. I know I made an initial habit of having a new post up every weekday, but I got to the point where I felt like I was forcing it a bit, I don’t want this to feel like a chore. Moving forward, I’ll post regularly but don’t expect something new every single day. Sometimes I just have nothing to write about. I do have something I want to talk about today, it’s actually been bothering me for a while and I never really figured out how I wanted to go about discussing it. As you can probably tell from the title, I want to talk about subscription models, but specifically how they’ve destroyed consumer markets, fair trade, and will probably be the endgame for many, if not most, industries. We’ll start with the most well known and widespread offender and move through some unfortunately harrowing extrapolations.

Netflix. I’ve had it, you’ve had it, 300 million people have it as of 2024. When it came out, I think Netflix offered an undeniable package. In the wake of cable TV being horrendously decentralized, expensive, and riddled with commercials, a streamlined, on demand, and devilishly affordable service that consolidated all of our faves without needing to deal with comcast was almost too good to be true. And yet, true it was. It wouldn’t be until 2015 when Netflix aired Daredevil and subsequent original serieses that the gauntlet would really be thrown down on network television; Netflix wasn’t just full of reruns, it had original content, and it was fucking sensational. Stranger Things, Outer Banks, Bridgerton, all while securing deals for things like Friends and The Office. There was a point in time where it seemed like Netflix could do no wrong, and, understandably, people flocked. It wouldn’t be long before other companies hopped in on the wave and launched their own services (WeTV, Youtube Premium, Disney+, Max (Discovery Max, HBO Max, HBO Discovery Max of Discovering who the fuck keeps renaming this one, Discovery+ is also its own service apparently), Prime Video, ESPN, Peacock, Paramount+, Tubi, Apple TV+, Starz, Crunchyroll, ESPN+, DAZN, etc.). Overtime, as these services have absorbed the market share and repossessed their IPs from competitors, they’ve become decentralized, expensive, and riddled with commercials. We’ve fallen back into cable, but this time people seem to think, and insist, that it’s some great money saving hack. 

They’ll tell the story of Blockbuster laughing Netflix out of the room when the latter approached the former for a merger decades ago, and how only one of those two is still standing. They’ll tell you that the hundreds if not thousands of shows and movies on Netflix for $20 a month is still better than $5-per-5-day-rental at Blockbuster. You only watch one or two shows on Netflix a month anyway, and as more time goes on and the quality of their originals gets shittier and shittier, they become less worth it, and you binge them at that. Blockbuster didn’t come with ads, either. This isn’t really the main point, more of a tangent, though I’d much rather patronize a Blockbuster in 2025 than Netflix. With 300 million subscribers, Netflix has taken a sizeable bite out of the streaming market, and the flippancy with which they increase your prices, shut down password sharing, throw ads on lower tier subscriptions, and make shittier more expensive content, shows that they’re less interested providing a good affordable service now, and more focused on milking their consumers for every dollar they have. How cute, a wild corporation is all grown up. I digress, this is far from the point I want to be making. Also, I know

Blockbuster was also renting, but somehow streaming feels like renting for renting. It's weird, and so much more violently predatory.

Streaming services have destroyed media preservation, services can and have delisted shows (HBO being the most egregious offender here) for no reason, while the removal of Looney Tunes from Max has not coincided with a reduction in monthly fee. Less content for more money, and you can’t even (legally) stream some of these shows or movies anymore. Users eat this shit up all day, because as long as we’re placated with a show or two, we’re fine being nickel-and-dimed. Personally, I’ve reached my limit with streaming services. You should too. Once all the physical media has been phased out, and every piece of content you consume is at the whim of some corporate douche with quotas to hit, we’re very quickly going to get to a “you’ll take what you get” scenario.

We see this in the gaming industry as well, but it’s a lot more volatile given how expensive the industry is at a base level. The Xbox Gamepass, the Playstation Plus, the Nintendo Online, the whatever whatever. Video games are expensive, they always have been, they are expensive to produce, and in turn, expensive to purchase. Therefore, the advent of “Xbox Gamepass” felt like a godsend during the 8th console generation when games had a $60 box price and about $80 in add-ons. Microsoft, being the megacorporation they are, was able to hemorrhage their earnings to consolidate market share, offering, quite literally $1/month fees for gamepass which had hundreds of thousands of titles. The elevator pitch was simple: Why spend $60 on every single game you want to try when you might not even end up liking it, when you can spend $1 per month on hundreds of games. Similar to Netflix, this was undeniable. In 2017, however, Microsoft largely had nothing besides their own in-house IP on the service and a bag full of older titles most people weren’t buying anymore anyway. To remedy this, Microsoft would launch the two largest acquisitions in the industry’s history: Bethesda and Activision-Blizzard-King, for nearly $90 Billion in total. It would become infinitely easier to sell gamepass like this, now, for $10-20 a month, you could play Call of Duty, all of Bethesda’s titles, and thousands of other games. This is still true in 2025. You might be saying “Geezaws, $10 is still really good, they still give out freebie months too, this isn’t a Netflix situation”. It’s not a Netflix situation because it doesn’t need to be. Despite the acquisitions, Microsoft is still playing third string to Sony and Nintendo in this space, it is their obligation to be as consumer friendly as possible to gain market share. It is working. Analysts predict 50 Million users in 2025. The reason Xbox can get away with this is because Microsoft is a $3 trillion company, they can afford to still be dirt cheap in a way Netflix couldn’t possibly fucking fathom.

So we’re at a point where Xbox is now offering hundreds of games, many of which are exclusive to the service, and they are only getting better (the excellent South of Midnight, monumental Claire Obscure, the earth shattering Elder Scrolls IP, etc). From a consumer standpoint, this is a company that is still charging peanuts for triple their weight in gold, it’s a great deal. Until you think about where this could and probably will go. Eventually, when Microsoft outlasts the impending collapse of the gaming market, Gamepass might be the only way to play games affordably. Meaning you’ll end up in a situation where you either give Microsoft a monthly fee, or you don’t play games much at all. If you think Microsoft won’t raise the monthly premiums when they’re the only competitor in the space, I have a bridge to sell you. Yet, you’ll see people support, violently, this move away from ownership of their titles (fueled by intra-console tribalism) “I only pay $1 per month and all I have to do is do that for the rest of my life to keep these games unlike Nintendo or Playstation who charge you $80 or $70 respectively per title”. (Nintendo is tweaking with $80 games, but that’s a discussion for another day). What people who regurgitate this sentiment fail to realize is that, the more people flock to Xbox for this deal, the more people move away from Playstation. And the more people who move away from Playstation, is the more Microsoft consolidates their market share. In 10 years, when Playstation is more of a boutique offering and Gamepass streaming is the most accessible way to play games for the majority of people, you will have to give Microsoft way more money than you do now, and they will run ads in the middle of your game. If you don’t, you’ll never see those titles again. The Netflix issue will befall the gaming industry soon enough. Not if, when.

“Geezaws, you can’t take Netflix as an example and throw it at gamepass, it’s not the same industry”. I can when it’s already happened to housing, too. Your house, the home in which you live, is currently facing the Netflix issue. People are decreasingly able to afford buying houses between the interest rates and base prices of housing. The reason is that property ownership is being consolidated by major corporations. It’s not the 44% figure that went around in 2023 (see: “44%” and “BlackRock”), but it is happening. The end goal, I’d imagine, is for housing in America to be wholly owned by private companies who can keep you on monthly rent for the rest of your life. It won’t affect everyone (rich people can always buy houses, the same way they can always buy copies of movies, and video games), but it will affect the vast majority of Americans. Interestingly enough, you almost never hear someone apply the counter argument of “paying $3000 a month for my house is infinitely more financially savvy than paying $1 Million for a house”. The reason for that is because housing feels a lot less like a luxury (the way TV shows or games might), and a lot more like a necessity. “You live in a house a lot longer than you play a game or watch a show”. First, some people watch shows religiously, two, this is about ownership. The same logic that Ubisoft uses to delist The Crew is the same logic a landlord uses to take a house off the market that a family has been living in for the last 18 years. The same logic that HBO uses to delist Looney Tunes. You didn’t own it, you don’t have any claim to it, you shouldn’t be disgruntled by its lawful seizure, you agreed to the Terms of Service. However, when the Terms of Service are bullshit to begin with but the market leaves few other options, consumers are pigeonholed into increasingly predatory business practices. It’s also happening to your car, but I’ve reiterated this point way too many times at this point to rehash it for the auto industry. You get the picture, the lease on your car also feeds into this “you don’t actually own anything and you think you’re happy about it now” issue. This is a thing that’s happening, we would be wise to talk about it more. I’d implore you to bookmark this and come back to it in 10 years, if Microsoft has done what I expect them to do, I was right. If they haven’t, feel free to send me an incredibly obscene direct message about how stupid I am.

Look, before we get into the “poor-shame-ery” of it all, I do think there’s value in easily accessible content: people have more access to more things, producers have a chance to access wider audiences with a lower barrier of entry. I myself own some of these services, but I’m also steadfast in supporting things I want to support. I do buy physical albums, I don’t watch many shows, but I do buy movie blu-rays, I do buy video games. I understand that this can get expensive, but the affordable alternative will get more expensive, and be less enjoyable. Just like milk, it’s only good for a while. Eventually, some executive is going to take a shit in your gallon and buy every other gallon so he can shit in those too. Moreover, you better like it, because it’s either that, or no more milk for you. And the quality of the milk is going to get worse, and the gallon is going to cost more. When it’s all said and done, you’re going to wonder how this all happened, and this is exactly how it happened. Of course, as with all things, there are larger economic factors at play, but this issue still stands on its own.

So, why am I talking about this today? I’ve seen an increase in people wanting free video games. They want games to be free to play. That a game at $70 should not survive when its direct competition is free. However, that free competition is never actually free. It’s a $0 game with about $100,0000 in microtransactions and add-ons and other superfluous bullshit that used to come in the box. Concord wouldn’t succeed even though it had no planned paid content at $40 since Rivals was $0 but had $20s per skin. Marathon won’t succeed at $40 because people have been told that what it (its alpha test) offers isn’t enough to charge half of what Nintendo’s Mario Kart World is offering.

It’s a tough line to balance, telling people they shouldn’t expect things to be given to them for free while also not sounding like a rich asshole. Trust me, I say this as someone with just as much investment in these industries, you’re probably better off buying the games lock stock and barrel than getting complacent with renting, because everywhere else it’s happened, it’s fucking sucked.