That post about the Office 2019 license expiring on Mac (https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/70667106) made me think how many of us might not understand how people outside the pirate bubble deal with situations like that. My understanding is that the post’s author completely misses the point regarding what’s happening here. Those who bought an Office license back in 2019 are very much likely to have upgraded their packages already, so they won’t even know about this expiration date. The very few who are still using their old Office version will react at that as if it were a notification, buy a new one and won’t bother about it at all.

My point is that their relationship with paying for software is very different from how a pirate sees it; paying for a new version of an application every couple of years is not a problem for them. It’s like gamers who buy Call of Duty or EA Sports titles every year. It doesn’t make them idiots, it’s just a different way of dealing with money and that service. They like the new shiny stuff and they can pay for it, so I totally understand their choice of buying it.

This reminds me of that Stop Killing Games initiative and some thought I had about it, and also many posts I see of people complaining about the end of physical media. All publishers publish their content following the trends and the technology available at that specific time, always trying to maximize their profits. It was always like that and always will be. If they used in the past physical media it was only because online storefronts did not exist, or we wouldn’t even have had discs or tapes or cartridges to miss.

To understand my point you have to think back about the origin of movie theaters. Movies were released exclusively on theaters and that’s the only place people could watch them. Once they went out of theaters, that was it. The movie was gone and people couldn’t watch it anymore. Nobody complained about it, that’s how things worked. Now imagine movies were invented now, how would studios release them? Actually, you don’t need to imagine it. YouTube and TikTok are here to show how people deal with video on 2026. They consume it online and never bother about owning it or keeping it.

Another example is live sports. You never see people complaining they can’t buy sports seasons on Bluray or download them. We have a culture of watching sports events almost exclusively live (with very few exceptions). If you don’t watch it live, you missed it. People are used about this and don’t complain.

So although I understand those defending the right to keep their media, the publishers have the right to release it however they want. We only see it as a problem because we were used with the way things were, if that way hadn’t existed, we wouldn’t even think about it.