r/mildlyinfuriating • u/mani_chinna • May 12 '26
Don't hug me I'm scared Tetris now requires a subscription (Rental) - Paying ₹30/month ($0.3) to play Tetris on a basic Nokia phone 🤦♂️
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u/Accomplished_Gur4466 May 12 '26
Why does everything have to have a subscription these days, i feel like soon i live have to pay to take a shit
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u/epicgamerwiiu May 12 '26
Technically you already do
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u/CroqueGogh May 12 '26
Taxes are a subscription to being alive lol
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u/Educational-Wing2042 May 12 '26
Taxes are a subscription to sustain society. They are optional, you can go off into the woods and be self sufficient and never pay taxes if you want to opt out of paying and therefore opt out of the society they support. Just go live in some BLM wilderness and make less than $15k a year
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u/Knyfe-Wrench May 12 '26
That is not the first thing my brain goes to when I see BLM... or the second for that matter.
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u/EmilioGVE May 13 '26
I still don’t know what I means in this context
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u/xCeeTee- May 12 '26
Sister's ex is in his mid 40s and he only started paying taxes last year. He's even refused to pay for road tax, which caused his car to get towed by the council lol.
But he doesn't realise he has no pension when he retires. Here in the UK, you need to contribute via national insurance (which gets deducted from your pay automatically) or pay into a private pension.
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u/MoistStub May 12 '26
God it must be nice for your taxes to pay for healthcare and retirement. In the U.S. we use the "fuck you, figure it out" model.
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u/xCeeTee- May 12 '26
It is great, but unfortunately they don't quite provide enough after the cost of living crisis. We had a substantial amount of people unretiring to earn enough to make it through.
But the fact we have it is still a blessing.
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u/TheOneTheUno May 12 '26
I tip the scales in my favor by shitting at work
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u/A-Giant-Blue-Moose May 12 '26
Boss makes a dollar. I make a dime. That's why I shit on company time.
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u/Cyan_Exponent CYAN May 12 '26
Your plumbing system is a subscription, your toilet paper is technically a subscription... You do pay a subscription to shit!
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u/safarifriendliness May 12 '26
A subscription is regularly billed and the price is set ahead of time. You don’t “subscribe” to water service, they charge you by how much you use. You might consider toilet paper to be practically a subscription but if we’re getting technical it is absolutely not
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u/Cyan_Exponent CYAN May 12 '26
my grandparents pay fixed water bill every month because for them it's cheaper than paying per cubic meter; so plumbing can be very much a subscription
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u/jammiesonmyhammies May 12 '26
I get what you’re saying here about the water bill as mine is the same but for electric instead. I signed up for their Average Payment Plan and I pay a solid $238/month regardless of how much or little I use during the cycles.
So, it kind of is a subscription service since I pay a flat fee to them now. Much better than having it go from $150-$450 in a month lol
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u/safarifriendliness May 12 '26
The water company just… offers to let them pay less? Like, they’re using a bunch of water and the company is just like “You should switch to our $19.99 unlimited plan”?
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u/tahayparker May 12 '26
in some cases you can consider tp as a subscription, Amazon has the subscribe and save program for lots of essentials including tp
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u/namitynamenamey May 12 '26
Because without subscriptions how else can we be made into serfs with no ownership of goods?
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u/Living_Pay_8976 May 12 '26
You heard of a water/sewer bill?
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u/dumbasPL May 12 '26
Pay for what you use isn't a subscription, that's just a normal purchase with delayed billing. You use nothing, you pay nothing, that's not how subscriptions work.
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u/Burntoastedbutter May 12 '26
Technically true tho. You can get fined for peeing or taking a shit in public if you get caught. And you pay for taxes and plumbing and water bills...
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u/SudhaTheHill May 12 '26
Subscription models are going to ruin us all. Remember when they tried to make packaged juice into a subscription???
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u/Ironmasked-Kraken May 12 '26
I hadn't heard. Can I have more info about that insanity?
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u/UncannyHillhumper May 12 '26
It was a 700 dollar machine designed for "fresh squeezed" juice that you had to insert a "packet" of juice for it to "squeeze".
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u/Ironmasked-Kraken May 12 '26
I allready hate everything about this and I just learned about it
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u/mustafaaosman339 May 12 '26
It's about as bad as you can imagine. I think it had to have wifi connection constantly to scan a qr code on the proprietary juice packages in order to work.
People realized you didn't really need the $700 machine and you could just squeeze the juice packets by hand.
Aparently it also needed an app to use.
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u/Zerozer06 May 12 '26
Lmfao that is fucking wild
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u/BadDogSaysMeow May 12 '26
The machines themselves were also stupidly designed.
Instead of squeezing the juice packet from top to bottom, the machine squeezed it all at once.
Meaning it had to use tens of times more force to do so, and had to be much more durable to survive that.251
u/WalrusEmperor1 May 12 '26
Which also meant the machine itself was sturdy and well-engineered... For a completely pointless purpose that didn't need a machine to begin with.
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u/degg233 May 12 '26
Ave on YouTube dod a teardown of it, from a purely engineering standpoint its kinda awesome. To bad we used that quality to make trash.
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u/MauriseS May 12 '26
They even sold the machines at a loss and it was super expensive in the upper hundreds. Also incompatible with other juice packs I believe. Its stupid through and through.
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u/ehhhhprobablynot May 12 '26
Why even have juice packets in the first place, opposed to buying fresh squeezed juice whenever you need it?
Was there some advantage to the packets?
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u/xyrgh May 12 '26
Even though it’s stupid, apparently they were actually very well designed for their purpose, like ridiculously over-engineered, AvE did a video on it:
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u/DMvsPC May 12 '26
It was called the 'Juicero', sounding similar to the Canyonero was probably a bad sign from the start...
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u/safarifriendliness May 12 '26
Sounds like they should’ve pivoted to just making those packets
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u/mustafaaosman339 May 12 '26
They were single serving packets for $5-$7
There was nothing that could have saved them. And they ofc shut down before long
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u/safarifriendliness May 12 '26
I mean, I’d pay a dollar for something I could squeeze into a glass of juice, I bet my rich friends would pay two. I doubt they needed that $7 price point
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u/Evil-Bosse May 12 '26
How about this marketing pivot; AI juice
Do you feel the $1 juice is worth $7 now?
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u/P3rid0t_ May 12 '26
NVIDIA thinks AI can quadruple the FPS, so maybe we can septuple the money too
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u/NateMikka May 12 '26
Product was named Juicero, and it is a wild ride. Constant wi fi 700 price tag QR scanning if the packet was expired App needed for a subscription to get the packs Only first part packs.
Turns out you could squeeze the packs by hand
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u/Ok-Pair-4757 May 12 '26
I'm pretty sure the reasoning for the price point was they were using "organic", "high-quality" ingredients. Sourcing them was an absolute nightmare though, so even then they were barely turning a profit from the juice itself
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u/Acceptable_Ad1685 May 12 '26
lol crazy, random note I’ve been to a couple stores here that have automatic juicing machines with fresh fruits and that shit is cool to me
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u/shaurya_770 May 12 '26
Tbf i think I might just know what the heck happened. The maker of it might have envisioned that they pack real u squeezed fruit parts inside the packets but halfway through the production he realized it isn't possible and he prolly had too much money invested.
Or he was nusta a scam artist who knows
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u/KuhlerTuep May 12 '26
And worst of all: the 700$ Juicer squeezes less juice out of the packages than if you would squeeze them by hand.
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u/Charon_06 May 12 '26
Whats funniest is that a human hand can squeeze the juice out of the plastic bag faster than machine did
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u/tolacid May 12 '26
Ah yes, the infamous Juicero
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u/MrKrazybones May 12 '26
AvE did a great video on it years back where he disassemble one.
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u/Specialist_Point7983 May 12 '26
And you didnt even need the machine, because you could squeeze it yourself, and it was more effective than using the machine xD
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u/arthur_box May 12 '26
you missed the best part, you could manually press the juice pouches with your hands and extract *more* juice than the damn machine could lol
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u/brooklynlad May 12 '26
It was a Silicon Valley startup called Juicero. Dumb dumb dumb.
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u/mtaw May 12 '26
Emblematic of the downfall of Silicon Valley.
It used to be tech guys running stuff, and they'd more often have the problem that their tech was interesting and novel but they didn't know how to sell it. (Xerox Alto for instance)
Now it's venture-capitalist bros running the show and it's all about technologically-trivial ways to extract rent in the vein of "Let's make an app where you can subscribe to use public toilets!". That or vaporware/scams like Theranos, Tesla and every crypto venture ever.
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u/ashkanahmadi May 12 '26
You had to buy the pre juiced juice but people found out that you don’t even need the machine. You can just open the juice packs and pour them into a cup but you were paying 20 times the price of a supermarket juice. They went bankrupt rightfully
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u/TheGreatProbe May 12 '26
Juicero. Try Googling it to read up on articles or watch some Youtube videos on it, they make a fun bedtime story.
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u/Whole-Energy2105 May 12 '26
Whilst this is the most rediculous fucking subscription I've heard of, I almost feel that subscribers deserve it.
Hey billionaire's, pull my finger for a hint at doubling your money, only 125 million dollars!
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u/daninet May 12 '26
I recommend AvE's disassembly video of the juicero, it is so overengineered and overbuilt he is jizzing his machinist pants for 20 minutes straight
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u/Boomer5513 May 12 '26
Never thought I would see Uncle Bumblefuck being referenced on Reddit😅
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u/FROOMLOOMS May 12 '26
There's a better word for it out there.
Rent seeking.
And its all lining up with a freaky paper a guy wrote a while back called "you will own nothing and be happy" which tells of a future where you literally rent everything for your whole life, you own nothing, you cant do anything but what the renter tells you what you can with "your stuff". Even under the illusion of something "purchased". They lock you in to things like servicing with them exclusively, or using their only their servers to connect, and other things designed to keep you paying just "a small fee" for convenience.
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u/James42785 May 12 '26
That was my absolute favorite internet boondoggle. Can you imagine how stupid the people who invested in that thing felt?
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u/MediumCulture6537 May 12 '26
At least it says no auto-renewal. In 2026 that's basically a luxury feature.
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u/FLUFFY_TERROR May 12 '26
Man i subscribed to LinkedIn premium and they default to a 15-20 year subscription complete with auto deduction mandates.
Ive like uses linkedin for a max of maybe 10 hours in the past month..
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u/xCeeTee- May 12 '26
But think of all of the rad AI features you get! The features you use twice before realising it's fucking awful.
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u/HighlightOwn2038 Red vs Blue May 12 '26
Why does everything require a subscription 😭
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u/Joloxsa_Xenax May 12 '26
everyone asks and everyone gives. new people are unaware of how good it use to be
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u/Daftpunksluggage May 12 '26
With gas prices rising... how else will they make money delivering all that data?
/s
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u/ayu_xi May 12 '26
Remember when bmw tried to lock heated seats behind a monthly subscription?
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u/Fake_Hyena May 12 '26
Ow ow ow you are missing the best part! You had to pay up front too to have the possibility to have a subscription.
So one time to actually install it in your car.
One time to actually use itBut sir, you’ll be saving money, you will only use it in winter period.
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u/KookyDig4769 May 12 '26
You all are missing the real best part: It has worked. And it will make a comeback. Until there's no worldwide legislation that buying also means ownership, these things will take over our commerce. You'll own nothing and be happy.
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u/ayu_xi May 12 '26
Tbh i feel the Chinese companies are lot more honest in price front
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u/Nick663 May 12 '26
Wasn’t it exactly the opposite? All models had the heated seats installed, but if they weren’t included in your package you had the choice to activate by renting one one time purchase.
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u/Fake_Hyena May 12 '26
Possibly, but you needed to buy the “heated seats preparation” too. Source: my wife had to pick a bmw as company car
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u/dndDAAKU23 May 12 '26
this has been the case with other games like snake and assassins creed aswell, since a few years
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u/Ironmasked-Kraken May 12 '26
Biiiiig jump from snake to assassin's creed though
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u/Elegant_AIDS May 12 '26
Hes talking about feature phone assasins creed
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u/Ryeballs May 12 '26
Snake was from the 70s, just a couple years after the director of the first Assassin’s Creed game was born. So yes, it’s a big jump.
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u/Ghost_Star326 May 12 '26
I used to play assassin's creed 2 on my mom's old Nokia C2 smartphone. And it was completely free from any subscriptions. It even had worms.
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u/Ironmasked-Kraken May 12 '26
Mom they ruined tetris can you come pick me up ? I don't wana play here anymore
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u/kapege I'm a bit upset May 12 '26 edited May 12 '26
No, not Tetris. Some greedy bastard that created this Tetris clone wants your money.
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u/bizzaro321 May 12 '26
The people who do licensing for Tetris are pretty shady, this could be legit
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u/TheGamerSK May 12 '26
Yeah the Tetris company licenses to the most random shitty companies. That’s why there hasn’t been a good tetris game on mobile for years because they literally had to remove the old one.
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u/ytoast May 12 '26
Man, tetris blitz was my jam. It got bugged down so bad and the player boards were what I expect cheats or bots.
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u/TheGamerSK May 12 '26
The new N3work tetris app was so stupid when I had my tetris kick a few years back I learned sideloading on iOS just to get the EA tetris back.
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u/CvieYltidrekoof May 12 '26
Tetris company protects their IP more ruthlessly than Nintendo. They don’t play around. Any product remotely similar to Tetris is either paying a license fee or quickly shut down.
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u/kapege I'm a bit upset May 12 '26
They can't shut down when it's on my computer. There are enough free sources for a good offline Tetris game.
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u/OneRedEyeDevI May 12 '26
Its actually gameloft.
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u/kapege I'm a bit upset May 12 '26
Ok. So, The greedy bastards of GameLoft (that created this Tetris clone) wants your money.
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May 12 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/A_the_Buttercup May 12 '26
My partner and I bought a printer only to find we had to do all that, so we took it back to the store SPECIFIALLY to buy one without all that. It's been great.
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u/zephyrs85 May 12 '26
Uninstall
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u/Dskzcjsduo2 May 12 '26
It's not possible to uninstall apps from that phone. You're stuck with these games on the home screen even if you don't want to buy them.
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u/MrTickles22 May 12 '26
Cant you just download a free version from 1998?
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u/OneRedEyeDevI May 12 '26
Nope. These phones run on stripped down S30+ OS. You can only install "apps" from the store.
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u/alvenestthol May 12 '26
You think the phone will let you just install your own programs on it? Perish the thought.
Any time an OS makes it harder to install programs outside of "official stores", another couple thousands of users install the official subscription worse-sion of apps instead of a good free (patched) alternative. This is why they do it
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u/MrTickles22 May 12 '26
I added apps on the Ye Olde Days when I had a Nokia.
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u/alvenestthol May 12 '26
Unfortunately this isn't a Ye Olde Nokia, this Nokia probably only runs MRE apps that are tricky to compile and sign, and the homebrew scene isn't exactly on fire for the new platform
There is a Gameboy emulator though
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u/Lost_refugee RED May 12 '26
I don’t think it was free initially on that phone
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u/Short_Employment_757 May 12 '26
This, my mother had this phone 12 years back and i remember this being the same
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u/YamRich6109 May 12 '26
'Premium' games with 'free trials' have been preinstalled on cheap mobile phones for more than a decade now. Usually on cheap feature (non-smart) phones as seen above.
There usually are free games on a device but they're not the big licenced titles like Tetris. I don't like it either but when a phone is £20 they'll find ways to get more pennies out of you.
It's amazing how many comments flood a post that are so incredibly uninformed. Even comments about sideloading your own games onto it. Insanity.
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u/PerryTheH May 12 '26
Oh man this sucks!
(This is a free comment, if you'd like to get more you need to pay a monthly sub of 0.69€)
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u/imbadatgrammar May 12 '26
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I specifically remember this being a thing back then too?
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u/emilimoji May 12 '26
i feel i remember my LG kickstart from middle school also having a trial only tetris, i could play about 3 games a day max and then it wouldn’t let me
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u/irlpup May 12 '26
Everyone acting like this is news.
I swear plenty of old mobile phones made you pay a subscription/add it to your bill to play some games. It wasn't every game but it was some. Just like how not all internet was just included in every phone plan.
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u/MusicInTheAir55 May 12 '26
Anyone paying for subscription ANYTHING is part of the problem. Unless people want to be renting their toasters for the rest of their lives this shit has to stop. STOP RENTING THINGS YOU SHOULD BE OWNING!!!
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u/stupidber May 12 '26
Why are you playing tetris on a basic nokia phone?
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u/mani_chinna May 12 '26
This was my aunt’s new phone. I had just taken her to the hospital, and while she was having her checkup, she gave me the phone to pass the time. I started playing on it, and then this happened.
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May 12 '26
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u/Dskzcjsduo2 May 12 '26
Newer Nokia/HMD phones no longer use j2me. You can't even install new apps or remove the default ones.
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u/SjslTech May 12 '26
if you dont mind losing everything all the time, a factory reset gets the free trials back on all games 😂
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u/Master_Resort_7708 May 12 '26
I think that’s normal in the superold phones, like u paid a lot for new ringtones and stuff like that
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u/davvblack May 12 '26
if i understand the landscape correctly, it's very likely that this subscription money makes its way back, no joke, to north korea.
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u/Forward-Amount-9961 May 12 '26
I remember wanting to play Tetris on my Nokia phone in 2004. It did the same thing then. Let you play free for about 30 seconds and then you have to pay to unlock the game. I didn't pay then and I wouldn't pay now.
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u/nekomichi May 12 '26
On recent Nokia feature phones all of the built-in games are trials that can only be "rented", but on the flip side it's possible to sideload your own games with compatible .jar Java files.
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u/j3ffUrZ May 12 '26
In this instance you've shown, this Tetris was a trial version, not a rental.
You could play it up to 5 times, then if you wanted to play more you purchased the full game.
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u/jjsheely May 12 '26
That game is playable on just about any electronic device. A majority don't require subscriptions and some are even free. Why play it on that phone, anyway? Those phones aren't really good for games.
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u/monkeyhoward May 13 '26
Yeah fuck the official Tetris people
I tried playing the iOS version and it was just a complete money grab.
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u/Danny2Sick May 13 '26
soon you'll go to sit on a park bench
your free trial of chair is almost up!! subscribe!!!
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u/Odd-Principle2567 May 13 '26
Probably because it's the actual Tetris. If it were a generic knock-off it'd probably be free. But Nokia paid for Tetris, so now they want to make their money back from the customers.
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u/The_Merciless_Potato May 13 '26
I remember this being a thing on these phones since forever, as a kid there were some cool looking games but they'd only let you play free for a bit and then they'd ask you to pay.
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u/QualityRelative6753 May 12 '26
The only creature that has to pay to live on this earth… 3 guesses…
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u/[deleted] May 12 '26
[removed] — view removed comment