I’ll start: printers.
I bought an HP in March 2020 when my job went remote and HP bricked it remotely after only 100 pages because I wouldn’t sign up for their subscription program. Ended up trashing a perfectly good printer.
Luckily my library’s close by and I can print there remotely.
Printers are a loss leader for selling ink cartridges. I have done my recent printing at Walgreens. It’s about 25 cents per page and I don’t need it very often.
Video games. I stopped buying games because they started requiring a monthly subscription to play.
Monthly subscription? You mean like PS+ or something?
Yes, also World of Warcraft, anything like that with a subscription. PS+/Xbox Game Pass was the death blow for console gaming for me. I want to buy the game, play the game. Not be paying each month.
Yeah, MMOs are a special case. Realistically WoW or XIV are a better deal than most games. I’m probably in the tens of thousands of hours in WoW since 2004. Pretty crazy value for money.
I agree paying for online in consoles is dumb but that’s always been their strategy - cheaper and easier to get into than computers and they’ll nickel and dime you since you don’t know any better.
If you’re a daily player, sure. But I’m the kind of person who can play every day for maybe a week, but then I’ll take a month or four off before I pick it up again. The monthly billing system does not align with how I like to play games.