Games as a Service is awesome, & hearken back to shareware (Off-Topic)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Wednesday, September 24, 2014, 11:08 (3503 days ago) @ Earendil

Take Destiny for Example. If they had said Destiny was free with a $10 a month subscription fee, you and many others could have gotten away with only paying $10 once, and if they wanted another $10 out of you they'd have to give you content worth coming back for.

But that can't happen. Game development is hugely time consuming and costly. Making actual new content is expensive. Either you have 9000 people working as a staggered assembly line so new content comes out every day, or you do what MMO games and Destiny do and try to string out content for as long as possible. That's why you have things like RNG, recycling of content, and grinding, because these things suck up time, and players think they are still playing the game and getting a good value.

That's why for the most part subscription based games are bad. I'm convinced only two economic models exist that don't ruin games: one time fee, or pay per play.