I'm old enough to remember door-to-door salesmen peddling subscriptions to magazines. The subscription price seems low compared to having to buy those magazines one by one, plus you get the convenience of having them delivered. So why do companies want to sell you that subscription? Because it makes buying their magazine or whatever the default option, and it makes not buying the more complicated option that requires more effort. Getting you to go to the newsstand every single month to buy a monthly magazine is hard, selling you a subscription once is a lot easier. You can usually count on people being lazy and not thinking deep enough, so they just let their subscriptions run far beyond the point where they would have stopped buying the goods one by one.

So, what's the danger? Surely I can afford €14.99 every month for UPlay+, can't I? Well, the danger, now as back then with the magazines, is getting persuaded to buy more than one subscription. If I subscribe to the Xbox Game Pass for PC, UPlay+, Apple Arcade, Origin Access, and Google Stadia, the subscription fees add up to €50 a month, and that is if I don't take the premium versions of the subscriptions, which can be up to €30 for a subscription. And I would have access to more games than I could actually find the time to play, so some of those subscriptions would remain unused every month. Also I would probably still have to buy some other games, as all of these services combined have only a few hundred games all together, while Steam now has 30,000 games.

So my consumer advice would be to subscribe, but only to one service at a time. Play all the games that interest you, then unsubscribe and subscribe to the next service. I am currently on the Xbox Game Pass for PC, but I will unsubscribe that one to try out Google Stadia for three months. Then I'll unsubscribe from that one, and try either UPlay+ or Origin Access, and so on. I might sometimes have a bit of overlap, but the idea is to be most of the time subscribed to only one service, and never to more than two.

For the record, I am subscribed to both Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, but no third video streaming service. And Amazon Prime doesn't really count, because I order parcels from Amazon frequently enough that the free delivery pays for the cost of the whole service, and Amazon Prime Video is just an extra.