There’s plenty of games you can just buy and not pay a subscription to. Hell, any game with a subscription is usually impossible to pirate, due to being server based.
Movies and TV shows almost invariably do require a subscription these days, though, unless you take to the seven seas.
I think “pile of goo that becomes a bigger pile of goo” does seem a lot more plausible than a literal ice cream cone. I’d take more issue with the self-destructing pokeball pokemon, Voltorb. What kind of evolutionary mechanism brought that on?