- The author canceled their Amazon Prime subscription on a whim and realized they didnāt really need it.
- Leaving Prime meant slower shipping but the author was happy to wait and still found the selection and delivery speed satisfactory.
- Many people love Prime for its fast shipping and convenience, but some readers expressed ambivalence and considered canceling.
Archive link: https://archive.ph/3M27c
I canāt be positive. Iāve never run any network traces on it. But it doesnāt have any of the hallmarks of service DRMs. No āconnectingā popup or login prompt. Iāve played Amazon-downloaded games offline. If thereās a hidden DRM, itās more-or-less obscured.
Letās 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. Itās 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.
Itās 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.
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 thereās plenty more either exclusive or just licensed. Itās never the most awesome shows of any service, but I could still find a few hours per day of video if I tried.
Yeah, Iām with you 5000% on that. Thatās where Gabe Newall is right. Iād 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 Iād never once think to download-and-unsub or distribute or anything.
ā¦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 wasnāt, I probably wouldnāt be paying either.
Okay, guess my prejudice about the amazon app was a but premature grounded on misanthropic bitterness š I retract that statement and stand corrected.
Oh autonauts. This i even bought on steam before it went for free. Still donāt regret. Still canāt 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 payā¦ Errrā¦ Prime.
I totally hear you on the convenience-point. Warez were never convenient. Just āfreeā. Yet, with a tiny amount of āworkā (given youāre not a tech-illiterate) the sailing-seas-way is a childās 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, desktopā¦ 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 š
Hereās 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, Gloomhavenā¦ Iām 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, thatās still ~15 good free games a year lol. So needless to say, Epic is always installed on my computer.
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 arenāt Humble Monthly, but HM is just games. Their TV isnāt Netflix, but itās $4/mo cheaper. You can get free shipping without Prime now (that wasnāt true before), but next day is phenomenal. As for books, thereās not really any replacement I know of. Itās 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.
For sure. Itās 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 doesnāt happen, etc. About 1 in 2 cracked apps show up as a virus and you can never know whether itās a false positive, so you have to use a computer condom and then STILL get tested.
Iām 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.
Anecdoteā¦ We bought Ring cameras from the Ring site for a family member in November. By mid-December, they still hadnāt 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 wouldnāt 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 āFree Returnsā on most items. You can literally write in āI was drunk shoppingā for your return reason and nobody bats an eyelash.
Aye, iād 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 āplay-niteā is great for multi-library-gaming btw. includes gog, amazon, itch, ubi, steam, epic etc.
Still do that. For over 25yrs I nourish my library. Just the MP3s made room for FLACs.
Yeah ok, I get that. Iāve got 2 servers running 24/7 with proxmox/hyper-v, so those tools all run in seperate VMs. But especially in this case, itās practically no maintenance. Iām still wondering why it works so flawlessly :-) As to the viral issueā¦I must say that iām 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, Iāve got daily backups of everything. So I just go back to yesterday :-)
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 itās not that much, so I just surf on the usual trial or just use free shipping or just pay 3,99 if need be.
Aye, thatās 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, youāre helped in 5 minutes at max. Dunno where youāre from, but we call our country āservice-desertā. Some might be cheaper than amazon and itās often tempting (my GPU was 2000,- elsewhere and 3000 on amazonā¦and i regret not using amazon), but if anything happens, youāre screwed and everything takes forever. Or they charge you extra fees, usage-fees, āthis item isnāt defective and will be returned to you at your cost plus feeā etc. You just never have to worry. One gift we needed to return (glass broken), but as it classified as āfood-itemā, 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 wonāt see that elsewhere here. No way. First you gotta prove it wasnāt YOU that broke it at home. I could on for hoursā¦
Iāve used playnite a few times. I always forget about it for some reason or another. Gog has a built-in tool like playnite and I fail to use that, too.
I still have it somewhere Iām sure, but I really gave up on it, for the convenience of youtube music of all things. Literally every song I ever had including a couple super-obscure albums Iād lost. And itās SO convenient. It just works for me everywhere I want it.
Every time I mean to start setting up servers, some reason (or my wife) talk me out of it. Iām jealous. Itās on my bucket list. Iām the only guy I know who has run server clusters professionally who has never had his own.
I have had a couple over the years; usually use the ānuke and restartā solution. Only one was REALLY major and I was never sure whether it was software or a dumb family member. My password-protected screenshare app went live one day and started buying Chinese gift cards with a clearly automated script. Thank god someone was in the office when it happened and they only got through a couple hundred dollars before we pulled the plug and called our bank.
I know resellers hate Amazon returns, but they agree to them. I will literally make buying decisions based on the presence or lack of the āFree Returnsā flag. I would literally pay for āreturn insuranceā if AllState started to do that, too. I hate return hassles.
Canāt complain about convenience. I use MediaMonkey since v0.1. It actually replaced my self-made music-archiver because it was simply superior and I couldnāt match it. And for mobile we just sync our favourite playlists and be completely mobile even when thereās no net. Itās the only serious tool for serious collectors :-)
lol. Sorry :) My wife actually talks me into it while I try to talk myself out of it (iām a horrible cheap fuck). I actually managed to hook her on the smart-home, as she runs into walls now when the system is down because there is no light. We forgot how to use switches :-) Seriously though: You should. If you have some kind of passion for it, just do it. I donāt need it professionally anymore (long retired) but just love to keep up and tinker. And nothing beats a working self-hosted something.
Oucchhh. That couldāve gone bad. Ok, granted, with family members working on the same machine/network, danger rises. We have a global firewall and a global ad-/tracker/malware-blocker. Wifey often nags that some sites wonāt work, and then itās manual-fix-time for me, but so she can surf freely without fear. I donāt even have any virus-/malware-scanner-crap installed anymore for decades. I occasionally check manually if somethingās hooked somewhere and thatās it. And when Iām really really really suspicious of something, thereās a sandbox. Honestly more ānormalā software phone home and do shit i donāt want than warez ever did. Every effing software wants to phone home, install 3 services no-one needs and what not.
And donāt get me started on the āpurchase software and own itā to ārent it for extortionate prices and never have anythingā. It so became the standard everywhere. Waitā¦what were we originally even talking about? :-)
Totally. At least we have that mandatory 14-days-return-policy. Everywhere. BUT a merchant might reduce your cashback upon āusage signsā. Which are very subjective unless still sealed. But the reason for the law was to promote online-shopping. So you could check your product at home like you would in a shop. And return it if you donāt like it. But it all takes too long, in the end I only check amazon. Better the devil you knowā¦i hate myself for that.
I think thatās one of the ones I tried. Itās just more convenient to have unlimited access to music, whether I own it or not.
What do you do for lights? Like motion/position detection into each room? Or voice control?
Iāve wanted to get into automation several times, and Iām never settled enough in a house to spend the money. Thereās always some reason we want to move and I donāt want to do all that permanent work to move. I even worked at an IoT company for a few years on backend and embedded code, so I have literally no excuseā¦
Not sure where that is. That would be nice (except that they could reduce the cashback anyway). Consumer Protections these days have been eroding in the US. Even our so-called consumer protection laws have landmines to protect the businesses.
Yeah sure, I get it. I actually use Tidal Hifi. But not really for streaming but for downloading and discovering new music. Has its benefits for sure.
Itās mostly based on motion. If itās dark enough in a room and you enter it, light goes into a - we call it motion-light - cyan. So itās clear to us itās automatic. If no motion after 2 minutes is detected it slowly fades out for like 20s so you got a chance to ārenewā the light by moving. Unless you switch a scene on, then it just stays on. If you switch it off, the automatic mode is on again. Took a good while to fool-proof it :-)
Voice control too, yes. But also homebrew. No Alexa-shit or similar. Also control by watch, or even outside over telegram.
Oh dude, we moved like 5 times in the last 5 years :-) Good thing is, we take the stuff with us. I use zigbee, not wiring. Wiring is superior, but also very fixed. So yeah, I regularly have to place everything again and adapt the scripts a little bit. But nothing much changes actually. Just a lil more extra-work after moving. Awesome, for an IoT-company I would even consider working again :-)
Lol, excusesā¦Itās a time- and money-sink, there you have great excuses. Also at least once a month I have to tinker here and there, or change a battery. Since Star Trek i wanted a home that reacts to voice and does things automatically. And tablets which give a great overview. Or, as mentioned, our watches. Automatic doors would be awesome now! And they gotta do the WOOOSH-sound!
That 14-day-forced-return is EU-wide AFAIK. And yeah, you guys took the āFREEDOM!ā really literally. You just forgot that the companies have those freedoms too :-) I often cuss about our country (or the EU), but as a consumer itās really nice having some decent rights. But if you need service, youāre in the darkest mid-age here. Recently had troubles moving some domains from my german ex-provider to a us-based one. The german one did cost 10x as much for half the benefits, but i had to wait 3 days for a fucking reply. Weekends are holy. The us-based answered in like 5 minutes on a saturday night.