I have a completely other sentiment from the top post, and a good part of my friends circle as well. I work as a developer and the business model is much cleare

I have a completely other sentiment from the top post, and a good part of my friends circle as well. I work as a developer and the business model is much clearer to me. The thing is to distinguish a service and a product. Buying a game, I expect a 1 off purchase and to own it. However if I want to have access to all the games in existance for a flat monthly fee like 50$ per month, thats a completely different story, and there's strong reasoning behind it. To run a service it perpetualy costs money so one off doesn't cut it. Either you have to pay an upfront cost of the lifetime value (which would be way to expensive) or you have to keep buying "DLCs" since the cost so far doesn't cover the furhter development. Also Dropbox and services alike might be cheaper to host for yourself, like many other things in life - car repair or home improvements, but that only cuts it if you are savvy enough in that particular trade. Thats the first part where it adds value - it simplifies things a lot. The second part is the ecosystem of integrations and sharing, and this goes to many other services as well. I usualy host my own for a large majority of services since its low volume use a free or small instance on any cloud provider does the work, however I still have Netflix, GSuite, Drive, Play Music and a range of others since they give to me more value than just doing it myself or are not worth the time effort. Also as a software engineer by trade I really hope more people start understanding that if you want baddass apps and games which constantly update and run on online servers, it has to cost money perpetually and you have to either pay for a subscription, look at ads, or have a freemium type of model to support the cost and eventually earn a couple bucks.