I played the whole game on Steam deck which was a pretty solid time

1000/1000 @ $C 75

I have 3 different first party fiber ISPs available to me at home with a max speed available of 8000/8000

Which is weird because I’m not in a city and live in a small town of less than 20k people

There is actually infrastructure involved… payment infrastructure, servers, modems and cell connectivity. Sure none of those things would be needed if there weren’t subscriptions, but there certainly is infrastructure used to verify your subscription and cut you off when you miss a payment.

Have you ever tried using aurora instead of the play store for devices that don’t natively have it?

https://auroraoss.com/