Always up for a chat
I love seeing people stand up to these mandates. I flat out ask the purpose for my physical presence, and unless it’s an objectively good reason AND everyone else required will be present, I’m staying away. I’ve too often arrived at an office to sit on a Teams call.
I’m not contributing to traffic pollution and seeing my kids less to satisfy someone’s whim or real estate investment. As far as I’m concerned, that ship has sailed. Virtual whiteboards exist. Welcome to the future.
It’s been amazing value for me - I’d spent a decade away from video games outside of Nintendo, so I had a giant backlog - I’ve played over 100 in the last 12 months on my Series X.
However, I’m noticing diminishing returns, since I’m spending a lot of time on games like Mass Effect, which are cheap to buy. There’s also a lot of games in genres I don’t like e.g JRPG, fighting, sports, and also plainly bad games.
The balance of good new games vs ones leaving the service is pretty poor, too. If I wasn’t locked into another year, I’d drop it for a while.
TLDR - look at the catalogue, work out how much it would cost to buy the games you’d play, and then decide.
It’s also cool to do this with savings pots. When people have a hard time saving, they’ll say things like “what’s the point in saving £10 a month towards X, that’s nothing”. I usually point out the annual figure, since a lot of people don’t think that way.
That said, personally I do this too much, and it can make it hard to spend and too enticing to save. But that’s a different topic…