Lvxferre

People often answer “it’s enshittification”. It isn’t wrong but it’s shallow.

Capitalism assumes expansion; stable revenue is seen as failure, not as success. And there are only so many potential customers, before you need to drop the price of the goods so low that your margin of profit lowers. So businesses reach a point where they need to expand, but can’t just “add customers”. They need to extract more money per customer.

But selling goods imposes a limit on that because, just like lowering prices brings more customers, raising prices shuns them away. You need to somehow disguise the additional cost, by fragmenting it into multiple small costs; because often, a customer who’d refuse to pay 50€ for the goods would pay 12 times 5€ just fine, for a total of 60€.

But why stop there? You need to expand further. 12 times, 24 times, let’s charge the customer infinite times. And if the customer feels like they paid enough, they don’t get the goods, even if they already paid their fair price many times over. That leads to the subscription model.

Problem of the subscription model is that customers are dumb, but not that dumb. At a certain point they’ll do the maths and say “hey, I’d pay less for this if I simply bought the goods, instead of the subscription”. So you need to make sure they’re unable to buy the goods, and the only way out is subscription.

But if you tell them so they’ll outrage. Rightfully so. So instead you disguise it as “trust me = be gullible, I’m doing this for your best interests. Noooo, it isn’t because I can milk more from each of you things this way, it’s just for you.” Or they put the blame on something they can’t control, such as “marketing tendencies” or “the industry”. The later is exactly what Playstation is doing.