This is fascinating to watch happening. As numbers-must-go-up businesses chase profits in a world where subscribership has peaked, they cannibalize their own value proposition to increase profits. This encourages more users to shift to piracy, accelerating profit losses.

Will we ever reach an equilibrium? My understanding is that total entertainment spending doesn’t decline or grow much, so it’s all just trying to compete with rivals for a bigger slice of the pie. I wonder if the major TV and film producers are just going to have less total money heading their way, and we’ll have less high-budget content created.

I don’t really care either way; lots of lower-budget content is amaze balls. I barely ever play AAA games or watch blockbuster movies, and I think it might be better for everyone to get more diversity in content creators (that lower budgets will likely enable.)

It will be very interesting seeing how this all plays out over the next few decades.

Now excuse my while I go pirate low-budget UK panel shows (that are region-locked internationally) while playing Final Fantasy 5 on an emulator modded with several fan-made romhacks.