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

by RC , UK, Wednesday, September 24, 2014, 12:39 (3504 days ago) @ Earendil

How is pay-per-play different than subscription. And which do you consider to be Games as a Service?

I sort of lumped all of those together as the same thing, because in each case you are paying a smaller amount for current content, instead of paying a large amount up front with the expectation of content. Even if nothing is ever added later, paying $60 is paying for content that you really don't understand yet.

Subscription: they don't care if you don't play as long as you keep your subscription
Pay-per-play: they want you to play as much as possible because that's how they make the most money.

Jumping to another industry, Spotify has been running into trouble with it's Subscription-based model: their most lucrative customers are the ones that have the subscription but don't really listen much. So their costs are kept low. While the ones that listen loads and loads cost more to supply and drive down the 'royalties-per-play' for the Record Companies. And low royalties-per-play makes Record Companies very uneasy about keeping their records on the service.