| ▲ | riiii 11 hours ago |
| I despise market monopoly abuse. But it's a bit of a Schadenfreude seeing the Microsoft as the victim. |
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| ▲ | throwaway346434 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| On the other hand, Xbox consoles these days sell with a "free trial" of their online services that automatically starts charging after 3 months.
It's at a minimum a dark pattern. At worst?
https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2023/06/20-millio... |
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| ▲ | vachina 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The entire modern Windows ecosystem is a dark pattern. Had to OOBE setup a Windows PC, it was an endless stream of nag prompts, all the way to the desktop. Extremely annoying to use. | |
| ▲ | shultays 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Isn't that what "free trial" means? If I am buying free trial, I would expect myself needing to manually cancel it if I am not happy | | |
| ▲ | happymellon 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | No it doesn't. A free trial implies that you can use a service for a limited period without cost. It's only because they have normalised it that you expect to get charged if you forget. | | |
| ▲ | monooso 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | You _can_ use it for a minimal period without cost. As for the normalisation argument, if there's a common understanding that "free trial" means "X months free followed by being charged", then that's what free trial means. | | |
| ▲ | happymellon 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | > if there's a common understanding Its only a common misunderstanding with these tech companies. If I had a free trial with a sports club, or many other things, they will not charge me at the end of the trial. They will ask me if I want to join. If I take a car for a trial drive, they won't bill me the entire price of a car if I forgot to mention explicitly that I don't want it after I return it. |
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| ▲ | Adverblessly 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | To me that sounds like a regular subscription with a "first three months free" discount, not like a free trial. | | |
| ▲ | orwin 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Exactly. My ahme club do a 3 week free trial, nobody new is paying until the 4th week (and even then you have wiggle room), you can just stop showing up, nobody will charge you. |
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| ▲ | bilekas 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I agree about monopoly abuse but I do believe it's acceptable to charge a fee for access to your audience. Microsoft and Epic don't want to pay the fees for using Google's payment system, which is a requirement here for Googles ecosystem (Apple too btw). I don't see an issue with that. It's not monopolization, Microsoft can build their own ecosystem (for the 3rd time try at least) and distribute apks to Android. The alternative 'spiteful' approach Google could make is what Microsoft wanted to do with Unity : "For each user over 1Million, you pay 1$ per download". |
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| ▲ | weberer 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yeah, its nice to see MS finally get a taste of their own medicine for a change. If they really cared about "breaking walls" and openness, they're more than free to release an Xbox app for Linux. |
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| ▲ | pjc50 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Indeed - where's the Google store on Xbox? |
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