81–90 of 97 posts
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Perhaps, I'm just comparing the cost to other games. If you buy a normal game you own it forever. If you wanted to go into debt and pay for a $60 game in unending monthly installments, you'd only need to pay 25 cents a month.
Except that with a normal game you don't expect to be able to play online with other people on a server you don't personally own.
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Can you explain why considering the dollar amounts that would earn interest equal to subscription costs has any relevancy into how much these services cost? Or put another way -- what?
Economically you can convert between a fixed price and a subscription price. A subscription has a fixed economic value governed by the interest rate. That is if you have a thing that generates $10 every year, you should be able to sell it for $200 (if the interest rate is 5%.) I think this is something people don't often think about. But it makes it very easy to compare different costs and benefits that involve time.…
Also, it makes much more sense for a large corporation to be exposed to the risks of investment return, i.e., it makes more sense for fixed-price software licenses. Well, maybe. Whoever has a smaller fraction of total expenses over cash reserves, and is this able to ride out a recession, should get the risk. In the case of a person with a big retirement fund, they should get the risk. However, in the case of someone living paycheck to paycheck, the company should get the risk.
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> a continuous stream of small patches with bug fixes, security updates, and design improvements That doesn't require a subscription. Plenty of companies offer a permanent purchase that comes with a year of updates or all minor-version updates or similar. The option is there to treat it similarly to a subscription, but importantly you never have to pay and what you already own can never be changed or taken away.
One I know is Bitwig who recently changed their licensing model so you get 12 months updates with your perpetual license and can pay to continue receiving updates after 12 months[1]. [1] https://www.bitwig.com/en/17/new-license-model.html
The case of Adobe is interesting. I think the move to a subscription model has been a hostile move for customers. The second you stop paying for the software, you lose the ability to open your old files. This has allowed smaller software applications such as Sketch, The Affinity Suite and Capture One to grab marketshare. I think Sketch’s current business model is perfect. Customers pay for a year of updates. If a cus…
Adobe users like to whine but ultimately they're more likely to give up their firstborn child than switch products they're so attached to the Adobe tools and ecosystem. And I'm not sure the upper tier of users who are kind of setting the standard is all that price sensitive to begin with. I'm sure they lose hobbyists. But I don't think there are enough defectors to change the bottom line of their de-facto monopoly on…
The challenge with modern consumer software is that: 1. Users expect their apps to work on their computers, tablets, and phones, which generally means you need to provide some ongoing service to keep your data synced between all of the devices. (For some simple apps you can get away with using a third-party service, e.g. Dropbox or iCloud, but many apps with complex data will need their own custom-built solutions.) D…
While I don't like the move to a subscription model for a lot of software, I really couldn't finish this piece. I don't think it was very well written, mostly because it kept repeating the same points over and over written a little differently. It could have been much shorter. I don't like the subscription model because in the end, for multiple subscriptions, it all adds up and ends up being more expensive. And that…
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> a continuous stream of small patches with bug fixes, security updates, and design improvements That doesn't require a subscription. Plenty of companies offer a permanent purchase that comes with a year of updates or all minor-version updates or similar. The option is there to treat it similarly to a subscription, but importantly you never have to pay and what you already own can never be changed or taken away.
That's how we do it with our products (purchases include a subscription). A subscription consists of: - A year of support on our forums (real company-provided support, not just peer-provided). - All minor releases and bug-fix builds within the year. - After the subscription has expired, you still keep everything that you purchased forever, including being able to download anything you own at any time (we keep track o…
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> As a counter point, I hope that by paying a subscription, I get a continuous stream of small patches with bug fixes, security updates, and design improvements. But you do realize that the subscription model is exactly the thing that removes the incentive to do that, right?
> But you do realize that the subscription model is exactly the thing that removes the incentive to do that, right? Can you name a single case where this has happened with subscription software, though? The big named examples in the article (as far as I could stand to read it, at least) are Adobe Creative Cloud and Microsoft Office 365. Here's the What's New page for Photoshop CC 2017, along with links to the changes…
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I think parent's point is about how the company is drawing in cashflow. If the customer owns perpetually a copy of the software, the only reason they'll buy a new copy is if the new one is substantially better than the old: hence, the only way the company makes cash next year is if they've been improving their product. With the subscription model, the company is still going to make that income regardless if they have…
On the other hand, this removes a big incentive for "featuritis". A developer can sit back and only add features that really matter to the product or fix minor but annoying bugs, rather than pushing unnecessary flashy changes dictated by a sales cycle. I'm not particularly happy about moving to what is effectively a rent society, but I think this is one of the few silver linings of the subscription model.
This is a topic that could use a good article. This was not that article. It's one thing to rail about the varios psychotics or psychopathics of this that or another. That's not the same as understanding the dynamics through which a situation emerges. What's particularly disturbing is when it appears that the outcome is inevitable. I.F. Stone, writing in 1967 on the Arab-Israeli crisis: The essence of tragedy is a st…