And just the effort of painting every one of those pixels one by one, it’s not like we have some magic tool to fill an image with the same color and call it a day.

Perhaps more likely years of work with colour and colour theory preceding a quick output of some content? Why the sarcastic tone?

Yes your comment is tautological.

So it makes sense to spend $50 a year on some pictures of those things that are already photographed?

I’m not sure how many times the things you’re taking a picture of has been photographed matters even slightly.

So? Photography is fun. My photos don’t exist until I take them.

I made a Fiverr account once for my art services. I deleted it within an hour of creation after reading how much money they would steal from my commissions.

Or even a market that let you just buy individual wallpapers as you want them, like how you used to be able to buy individual tracks in itunes instead of a whole album.

A subscription model is a bit silly.

I forgot about that! And most songs sound like ass when you hear it over a phone, especially before whatever they did in the last decade to make voice calls more clear

Almost is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.

For a single piece sure.

I presume the idea here is that you have access to their full library. Personally, I fail to see why I would change my wallpaper enough to warrant even a free app to change it, let alone 50 bucks.

If you know an artist doing commissions that cheap they are depressed, desperate, or want to fuck you.

Just use a free wallpaper app and pay a random artist 25 bucks

It’s 50%, which is honestly quite low

okay, cool, but I am going to assume you don’t speak for all artists.

the website is hideous and unusable

huh?

Which side?

Bingo. Major component of persuasive design.

The point is not whether there are more features. The point is to give you an incentive to go yearly, and in this case it’s a huge “discount” even though it’s in no way worth the monthly cost. The monthly plan isn’t meant to sell you the monthly plan. It’s meant to make the yearly plan look good.

There are a lot of people walking around with cracked screens who would seem to disagree.

Im not rich and I use my phone without a case

I guess you could also have fairly sticky hands.

and watch some of those reviews.

Yeah, sometimes I do too, if only for the novelty of it. But they’re certainly not for us.

The app is a bad idea with a bad deal for artists.

Citation needed. Do you have any data on the app’s profit share structure? Because at the price they’re charging, if they’re passing on a decent share of it to the artists, it sounds like it’s not a bad gig.

I agree. But that’s a subjective stance obviously. I think since Minecraft was priced appropriately for its current value, there was no need to consider future value increasing. And on that basis they could have sold the game for more and chose not to. Still the point is that even if most people didn’t consider it, it incentivizes early purchases. If it were priced at the 1.0 build price at alpha launch, only die hard supporters would have bought it. Everyone else would wait. Same thing here.

You’ve just showed me why my point works. If you buy in now, your early purchase of Minecraft becomes more valuable over time as stuff is added. Therefore, buying now is better than buying later.

Whereas with his app, it’s overpriced now and will add features until that value proposition is met for more people. That discourages you from buying it and there’s no reason to buy it. Especially since it’s a subscription.

Now could he have done the Minecraft model? Yes. And since it’s a subscription, the price can go up slowly with no benefit to early adopters. I think the main reason he didn’t do that is because changing pricing this way generally doesn’t go well.

I would cry so hard.

Crazy Frog itensifies

I still have PTSD from the era of the ‘polyphonic ringtone’ hype. Those were the ‘fancier’ ringtones that weren’t just your usual beep or bell.

Usually you’d buy them by sending a text message to some expensive number and it would be sent to your phone. If you were dumb, you could get basically scammed into a ‘subscription’ so you’d get sent these expensive ringtones frequently. Many a teen got yelled at for that mistake in the late 90’s.

If you were a tech savvy lad, you could hook your phone up to your Windows PC and upload shitty ringtones yourself as well as wallpapers and such.

These days, who gives a shit? My iPhone ringtone is still the default ring. I honestly don’t care what it is, as it’s usually just annoying anyway.

Yeah, that was a cash cow for a few years and now everybody has their phone on vibrate.

I remember watching the rich kid in middle school buy a ring tone right in front of me, flexing that his device could play a 12-second loop of Tubthumping by Chumbawamba.