Dude, I’m not disagreeing with your point, but your presentation is beat up from the feet up.

Caveat: been drinking because gestures at everything

1. At one point, you say it’s $950 a year after establishing that the actual cost is $950 after two years.
2. Your investment counterexample arbitrarily includes a $200 monthly additional investment which blows everything up and makes the example pretty much incomparable
3. Your investment counterexample also assumes an immediate initial outlay of $950 rather than distributing that over 24 months.

Basically you’re comparing two wildly different scenarios, which makes your point seem pretty broken, regardless of how right your actual thesis is.

TL;DR: Cancel your MMOs, play retro and discounted indie games, and stay in school, kids.

Excellent, except for a tiny little detail:

I don’t play games to make money. I play games because I want to play games.

Where the hell are you finding an 8.5% ROI in this economy??

Your ChatGPT analysis is still garbage.

Regardless, if people feel that spending that money on a game is valuable to them, why is that so unbelievable to you? Do you expect everyone to sit quietly in the dark when they're not working? Let people enjoy things.

It's really weird to include ~500% additional monthly contributions into the math.

It's like those "if you don't smoke and put away that money for 30 years you can buy a Ferrari!"

Where's your Ferarri grandma?

It's okay to have fun and WOW is cheaper than boose and a lot of other things, if you can afford it ofc.

lol why tf do you have two year subs to two different MMOs and why are you comparing the cost to an investment.

And I’m a psycho who keeps 3 OSRS memberships going because I don’t want jagex to go under and delete my accounts

I don't know how anyone has time for two live service games at once. Even in my peak college slacker days, just World of Warcraft alone was a lot. I started playing Honkai: Star Rail this summer and a friend wanted me to start The War Within expansion with her. I've been doing the tourist thing in WoW for a few years now, and even still with that casual pace of play, the combination was far too much for me these days.

My gaming tastes can get mercurial, so I prefer the irregular stuff now. I love that I can just log into Guild Wars 2 any time without even thinking about money, and I've spent a whole $10 on HSR in the six months I've been playing it. Makes it much easier when I suddenly get a few days of light work here and there.

That’s why I quit gamepass. I need to be cemented to my xbox most of the time to justify continuing the subscription.

I have never thought it is worth it, even back when WOW released, the economy was better and I was a teenager with a lot more disposable income I would never pay for a subscription to play a game. It is just a terrible way to run a game and I have always thought that.

I've never really understood why people would support that kind of model personally, there has never been a justification in my book.

Back then Guild Wars 1 was and always will be the far superior game when put up against WOW in my personal opinion and once I'd paid for that I could play it every month without further outlay. Shame how they ruined it with GW2 (unpopular opinion I'm sure but I stand by it xD)

I think the cost of WoW has been fairly reasonable over the last 20 years. The subscription has stayed the same price of $15 per month the whole time, and if you know you are going to play WoW for the whole year, it is just $13 per month with an annual sub. The only thing that has gone up in price is the expansions which have gone from $40 to $50.

I think another point that you are missing is that WoW players often spend most of their game time playing WoW, which means they spend less on buying other games.

Another reason to play open source remakes instead of the original

I feel like subscriptions are just fine though.

If you can't afford subscriptions like those, then you should probably have other priorities to really worry about.

That said, I play WoW on and off, I never play 24 months in a row or so until the next expansion. I often total at barely half a year or maybe even less depending on the expansion. Like currently I've only paid for one month and have bought game time with lots of gold I had, but I barely played during these times.

If someone would play every month every expansion they probably easily got their money's worth out of it if they're that invested in the game, and probably spend far less on other games or hobbies. I think subscriptions for MMO games have changed the least of all too, comparing it to like Netflix that changed prices regularly and easily doubled since it became popular. And they're most definitely not going to reduce subscription fees because other unrelated things got more expensive.

Same principle for streaming services, you probably don't watch all of them, so why not just limit yourself to one and swap between each? Nobody is forcing anyone to buy every streaming service, they're luxury and entertainment products, if you can't afford it then simply don't buy it. I do think streaming services get out of hand, but they keep doing it because people keep buying it.

Giving up entertainment for money in the future is impossible for a lot of people.