Marques Brownlee, known as MKBHD, faced backlash over his new wallpaper app, Panels, due to its high subscription cost ($49.99/year) and concerns over excessive data permissions.
Brownlee acknowledged user feedback, promising to adjust ad frequency for free users and address privacy concerns, clarifying that the app’s data disclosures were broader than intended.
The app, which offers curated wallpapers and shares profits with artists, aims to improve over time, despite criticisms of its design and monetization approach.
$50 a year for wallpapers or I could go to wallhaven and get millions for free?
The wallpapers are nice but the website is hideous and unusable.
Edit: typo
Which side?
Typo, my bed
(intentional this time, it’s late)
Good night😴
the website is hideous and unusable
huh?
Used it on desktop, had to create account, even after that kept giving me errors that i need an account…
Use Muzei and either curate your own collection or pull in one of their pre-made ones.
The “shares its profits with the artists” part is relevant here.
It would almost be cheaper to commission an artist frankly.
For a single piece sure.
I presume the idea here is that you have access to their full library. Personally, I fail to see why I would change my wallpaper enough to warrant even a free app to change it, let alone 50 bucks.
If you know an artist doing commissions that cheap they are depressed, desperate, or want to fuck you.
But that’s the best type of artist
… why are they always so goddamn hot.
Could just commission someone on Fiverr for an original artwork
Fiverr is the worst. They enable abusive clients to find victims, and AI con artists to find marks.
So that sounds exceptionally awful. You have any more info on that?
There’s also this infamous story. And also this one. I recognize that anecdote is not the singular of data, but there’s a pretty substantial paper trail on Fiverr.
One piece digitally drawn in an hour or two maybe. Otherwise it is likely premade, generated, or not their source. Yeah- if you are talking backgrounds for a phone they could be more abstract or start with a base but for 45 bucks? That buys you an hour or two of that artists time- three if they like the idea or you.
Just use a free wallpaper app and pay a random artist 25 bucks
Almost is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
Nah it’d be cheaper to commission the artist for a dozen or so pictures for 45 bucks:
First you need to blow some ungodly amount of money on breaking the time/space barrier… Then travel back to the 1920s and find a starving artist. Then pitch him 45 bucks for some art. Easy! 45 bucks to them is like 800 of our today dollars.
Sarcasm aside- it seems people really are disconnected on how much a commission or art costs. Sure you can buy prints reasonably priced but any commission that isn’t a speedy doodle is going to clock in a helluva lot higher.
I’m an artist who has uploaded many of my works to wallhaven entirely for free online, alongside the games I put out and any other creative venture I’ve pursued over the years.
That part is problematic not relevant.
okay, cool, but I am going to assume you don’t speak for all artists.
No one speaks for all X.
Did he disclose an amount?
5% to artists is very different than 40% to artists.
Or is he adopting the Spotify bottom line?
Only pay artists after X downloads and only pay a few cents after thousands of downloads and use the rest for profits
It’s 50%, which is honestly quite low
50% is quite decent and is 20% higher than most other “decent” services including physical stores. Building and keeping an app up to date with ever changing content requires at least a part time developer which is expensive.
Well the baseline is that most wallpaper apps, which don’t pay artists afaik, charge like $5 a year, so if you’re gonna charge me 50, I expect 90% to go to artists
This. Hell you can generate literally endless wallpapers for free.
Here’s his wallpaper: MKBSD
The highrises are by Chris Hytha, a pretty cool dude whose work I do enjoy.
Whose website is this? Many of these look like Justin Maller’s (IG)
looks like shit thanks 🙏👍
Calling them underwhelming is an overstatement. I can find at least 50 better ways to burn my money.
This professional guy shares handmade wallpaper for free.
wallbase/wallhaven as well
Can people no longer upload a JPG to their phones? What am I missing here?
It sounds like it’s a way to get high quality original art / photos for use as backgrounds and support the people making them too.
That’s what patreon is for.
I started to get worked up but then i remembered I don’t particularly care. He’s in it to make bank, not necessarily sell you a quality product. If he were, he wouldn’t be selling a wallpaper app.
Yeah it seems like a weird thing to get mad about. No one is forcing anyone to pay this guy for his wallpaper app. Keep watching his videos if you enjoy them or don’t. The wallpaper app seems as inconsequential as his DBrand shilling. I watch his reviews every year and I’ve never bought anything from DBrand lol. Mostly because the products look like shit tbh.
That just about sums it up.
I feel this is going to be an unpopular opinion, but if you want unique wallpapers, consider paying an actual artist, instead of an influencer
I don’t think that’s going to be an unpopular opinion around here. Maybe a little tricky in the logistics of distinguishing between an artist and influencer and finding an artist who you like and can pay for a phone background, but other than that you’re not going to find many Lemmings saying “no, pay an influencer!”
If I want a unique wallpaper I go on a walk in the great outdoors and take a picture
most unique things outdoors are photographed already
So? Photography is fun. My photos don’t exist until I take them.
So it makes sense to spend $50 a year on some pictures of those things that are already photographed?
I’m not sure how many times the things you’re taking a picture of has been photographed matters even slightly.
Sounds pretty reasonable to me. Avoid sites like Fiver, though. Lots of AI bullshit pretending to be real art.
Even before the flood of AI bullshit Fiverr really, really sucked for the human artists, creatives, coders, and other freelancers employed through the platform.
I made a Fiverr account once for my art services. I deleted it within an hour of creation after reading how much money they would steal from my commissions.
Yikes
“curated wallpapers” including random generated stuff, and “shares profits” on a 50/50 basis, for a shitty app developed by what looks like three fivers in a trench coat.
This guy is no different than every other smarmy “Tech Reviewer” on YT. His reviews have been borderline useless for the last few years. This is just the next logical step that these guys take - hitch themselves onto a tech accessory or app and charge their followers predatory prices - fuck this guy.
It’s kind of a paradox when you think about it. Good reviewers are often just regular people with a passion for tech but as they become more popular and prolific they become part of the industry itself. Once that happens even if they try to stay objective and critical their perspective is so different from regular people that reviews are just part of the sales and marketing strategy rather than pro tips from an enthusiast.
Yeah, I imagine him getting shipped products over and over and then likely being paid to try them out and then paid to review them would dampen the authenticity. That said, I haven’t watched much of his content so I couldn’t tell you if he really was really bias or changed over time.
He’s on the better side of tech reviewers IMO. I think sometimes he’s more focussed on describing what sets a product apart in the market, rather than judging whether that niche is worth filling or not.
Definitely doesn’t feel scammy/overly ad driven.
It costs $49.99 per year (or $11.99 per month)
Why in the hell does the monthly price end with you paying 280% more than the yearly. That is such an absurd discount I don’t even know why someone would pay at all for this app but more so I want to understand where the price justification is and who came up with this plan.
To be clear I support artists and more than welcome a platform for them to share and sell art if they wish… I don’t get why it needs to be a subscription service and I don’t see how such inflated charges are going to help artists as it’ll just discourage large numbers of people wanting to support them.
I want to understand where the price justification is
The justification is that people should be yearly subscribers when they can more easily forget to cancel it.
Short version: there’s an $80 bread maker with 5 features, a $120 bread maker with 12 features, and a $475 bread maker with 14 features.
The $475 bread maker only exists to make the $120 version look like a bargain.
I believe this is called the anchoring effect in psychology, and it’s really effective
Bingo. Major component of persuasive design.
But in the end you get more feature for a higher price. In this case it’s the same app for different prices depending on time frame… not to mention the app has no purpose beyond finding a wallpaper so it only really has 1 feature.
The point is not whether there are more features. The point is to give you an incentive to go yearly, and in this case it’s a huge “discount” even though it’s in no way worth the monthly cost. The monthly plan isn’t meant to sell you the monthly plan. It’s meant to make the yearly plan look good.
Also the nature of a wallpaper app, maybe you just want to plop in get a wallpaper and scamper off into the sunset.
Matter of fact for the $50 a year price I could sign back up for a month twice a year and still come out on top.
Probably because you can pay for a month and download all the wallpapers and cancel.
Paying for ANY wallpaper is just silly, much less a subscription model.
The only time you should pay for one if it’s an artist you want to actively support and/or thank for that specific work.
I agree, although i DID spend 5€ on wallpaper engine and i am very happy with it. (just know that our chinese friends are using the steam workshop for WPE to upload/download porn because most porn sites are great-firewalled lol, so take care regarding your filter settings)
I actually do have WPE… it was in a bundle one time, so I got it for free. Tried it once, but I’m conceptually not a fan of running extra software on my gaming PC to run fancy wallpapers.
Supposedly it’s not TOO power hungry and can turn itself off when gaming. How’s your experience been with that?
I’m currently running 2 displays at 1080p (one HDMI, one DP) on a 3070TI. Idle TDP with just plain color is 37-40W, 2 different scenes with features like audio reactivity and mouse input @15FPS are 55-60W. They get paused automatically when a window is maximized (per display), the secondary display pauses additionally when i run a fullscreen/borderless window on the main display.
It is absolutely useless eye candy. I love it lol
ETA: They DO have over 15000 curated wallpapers, if you stick to that you can avoid the questionable content easily. if you look at it from this perspective, that’s worth the price of a small meal.
For the last 30 years, they’ve been trying to charge for dumb shit like wallpapers, screen savers, mouse cursors.
Who are these people who buy them? And what’s wrong with you?
ringtones baby
I still have PTSD from the era of the ‘polyphonic ringtone’ hype. Those were the ‘fancier’ ringtones that weren’t just your usual beep or bell.
Usually you’d buy them by sending a text message to some expensive number and it would be sent to your phone. If you were dumb, you could get basically scammed into a ‘subscription’ so you’d get sent these expensive ringtones frequently. Many a teen got yelled at for that mistake in the late 90’s.
If you were a tech savvy lad, you could hook your phone up to your Windows PC and upload shitty ringtones yourself as well as wallpapers and such.
These days, who gives a shit? My iPhone ringtone is still the default ring. I honestly don’t care what it is, as it’s usually just annoying anyway.
Yeah, that was a cash cow for a few years and now everybody has their phone on vibrate.
Crazy Frog itensifies
I remember watching the rich kid in middle school buy a ring tone right in front of me, flexing that his device could play a 12-second loop of Tubthumping by Chumbawamba.
Yeah, that rich kid Danny. He plays the songs that remind him of the good times and sings the songs that remind him of the better times. Oh Danny Boy, Danny Boy, Danny Boy
When toy story came out, i saw this toy story pc game. I put all my money together just to then find out that it wasn’t a game, it was a cd rom with like 12 wallpapers on it.
I would cry so hard.
I think I would like the idea (and at first this my understanding) if you could buy one wallpaper for $1 (or a pack of few for $3) and the 70-90% would go to the artist. Also app would have to limit tracking to just some basic stuff. I know you can get wallpapers free, but supporting something that looks great on your screen would be a nice option.
Of course subscription service for this is mad.
Haven’t watched him in forever. Has he reached full money grab?
My phone has a camera… i can set photos as wallpapers…
I got a Note 2 at launch and was showing it off at work to people interested in it.
someone asked about the background and where I got it. said I took it and left it at that.
took the pic of the top of my bathroom trashcan while dumping some toxic waste.
pic is the same trashcan now, like me it’s a bit dented, dirty, and doesn’t open as well as it used to. but, it still works.
No offense but I wouldn’t pay $49 for that. Maybe $48.75, but not $49.
$48.99, the lowest I’ll go for you my friend
Lol screw this dude, never liked him to begin with.
The first time i saw one of his reviews, i thought, “This guy isn’t genuine.” “That’s not an opinion. it’s a specification disguised as an opinion.”
He gave off real shill vibes, and then i later found out he was an apple simp, and it all came together. He isn’t super biased, but he definitely gives more providence to apple products.
His recent review of the apple vr headset was too nice. He said some bad things but qualifies each critisism with a “but i like that” or “but it’s not a deal breaker.”
Maybe i created a bias against him based on my early impressions, but i just get a bad vibe from him. He doesn’t seem to give his opinions.
I will say, though, an exception would be that rabbit thing he reviewed poorly recently and got some backlash from the manufacturer for. I believe he then came back and justified his review. Although everyone was reviewing it poorly so he would give the game away if he said it was good. So perhaps its not an exception… i dont know. Im just freestyling this comment…
When it comes to Apple, check out Snazzy Labs.
Totally on board with you. The only tech dudes I trust are ones that are around Linux space bc they usually tend to call out bs when they see it; mental outlaw, someordinarygamers to name a couple.
Tech bro knob slobber.
Marques Brownlee: “Don’t pay for what something will be, pay for what it is now” and “I don’t review what will be, but what a product is now”
Also Marques Brownlee: “Pay the subscription fee now for the unnamed unspecified features this will have other than just wallpapers now to fund future development”
Who knew the next company he would “kill” would be his own. The only way to find his app on Android is to use the link from his site because of the generic name.
BTW Wallpaper Engine, which has an android app, is currently $5 Canadian, and I am told with Proton can also work on Linux PC’s and has an huge amount of modifiable wallpapers.
I don’t think that’s what he’s saying. You have to ask yourself a question: is offering an expensive upfront subscription for an evolving product an endorsement of assessing future value into your purchase. In my view, it isn’t and it’s not what he’s saying.
What he is saying is that to the minority who will find this a good value or who are okay donating to help them implement new features, go ahead and hit that button. Then separately he’s saying “the price will make more sense to more people as features are added” which is true but is not an endorsement of paying the current price for those promised features. At least from what’s in the article and what I’ve seen.
It’s the difference between saying that you should buy Minecraft because it will become an awesome game one day versus saying you should buy Minecraft because it’s either worth it to you now or you’re okay with helping to fund the development of future features you’ll receive. Those are very different.
Minecraft was already awesome when I purchased it in 2011, I didn’t have to get promised vague future features.
I agree. But that’s a subjective stance obviously. I think since Minecraft was priced appropriately for its current value, there was no need to consider future value increasing. And on that basis they could have sold the game for more and chose not to. Still the point is that even if most people didn’t consider it, it incentivizes early purchases. If it were priced at the 1.0 build price at alpha launch, only die hard supporters would have bought it. Everyone else would wait. Same thing here.
Also Minecraft is a good example of why his argument is shit as that started off at a low price and increased as it became more complete
You’ve just showed me why my point works. If you buy in now, your early purchase of Minecraft becomes more valuable over time as stuff is added. Therefore, buying now is better than buying later.
Whereas with his app, it’s overpriced now and will add features until that value proposition is met for more people. That discourages you from buying it and there’s no reason to buy it. Especially since it’s a subscription.
Now could he have done the Minecraft model? Yes. And since it’s a subscription, the price can go up slowly with no benefit to early adopters. I think the main reason he didn’t do that is because changing pricing this way generally doesn’t go well.
Regarding Wallpaper Engine on KDE Plasma, since I switched to Linux a few days ago: here is the repo for the one KDE Wallpaper Plugin i found that worked fine on Nobara. Subscribe to the Wallpapers in Steam, point the plugin to the steam library, done. just know that there are some wallpapers not working yet, which makes plasmashell crash, but no biggie, change the wallpaper and restart plasmashell again.
