What's funny, or maybe sad, is that this used to be a solved problem back in the CD-distribution era of software. You buy the software once (or in this case the hardware that comes with a software license). You get bugfix patches and minor updates for a year. Next year the next version releases with major new features, and you either pay the price of an update or you stay on the version you are on. Good incentives for all sides. Development stays aligned with existing users, because otherwise they just stop buying updates. And in return the developer gets predictable revenue.
Then Minecraft pioneered the model of users paying once and getting free lifetime updates. And shortly thereafter various SaaS pioneered the model of the user paying monthly while the software barely changes.
And somehow we pretend like those two business models aren't both broken, and like the first one somehow doesn't work anymore
I don't remember minecraft being a driver of this - I do remember Patio11 on here being very influential in start ups doing subscription software instead of "finished" desktop applications.
That is not to blame him, but I remember his writing being very influential with start up founders.
Maybe popularized is the better word. It probably wasn't the first software ever to do this; free lifetime updates became viable with the internet sometime in the nineties and Minecraft only started doing it in 2009. But at the risk of being proven wrong I'm willing to claim Minecraft was the first software to do this and go mainstream, being recognizable outside its niche
I know Guild Wars had original idea in the era of "lets make new world of warcraft and get rich from subscriptions" to release mmorpg without any subscription, you only buy it once and you can play forever.
It was 2005.
You have your timeline slightly wrong because GW1 (if we take dev time into account) basically launched at the same time as WoW - and WoW wasn't the first subscription MMO. I suppose if this was a major reason, EverQuest would be the one to inspire it.
True, I had forgotten about UO, but for the sake of the argument I don't think it really matters. I don't have numbers ready, I had always seen EQ as the bigger mainstream success, could be wrong. Also was a bit before my time, I didn't pay sub fees for my games until 2004/05ish.
Edit: I didn't actually want to say that EQ invented it, but I had phrased that badly.
That's basically a variant of a subscription, but one where the end user churns aggressively.
It's worse in many ways too - it's a lot harder to gauge interest as the developer to understand how well any update will sell, and if the updates "stack", then a user only pays for the newest update to get all older features free. It's also worse from a cashflow perspective for the developer (but better for consumer) since they have to pre-build the update before any chance of getting paid for it.
The principal difference is that things keep working if I stop paying. All other aspects are secondary.
And generally speaking there is a lot of options that are excellent for developers but complete shit for the users. That's obvious, but it's also off the point in the context of fairness.
