> Worth is an entirely subjective value; discussing it does little to change what is a fundamentally personal perception.
>
> One off payments vs subscription is ultimately an ideological debate; and one that I find people shift from left to right on as they get older. Much like taxes, the older you get the more you realise they're not only necessary but vital for society.
>
> Anyway...
>
> One off payments effectively floor the amount of money Scirra can earn each software cycle, sure they might make more initially, but once they've made a single sale, they've removed that consumer from the market. This is completely fine if you're selling a static product, but Scirra are selling software, software that they continuously update and improve, that dramatically changes throughout it's lifespan (Compare C2 of 4 years ago to C2 today!), and services like multiplayer servers and mobile builders.
>
> Subscription is the only logical commerce for a product like this - to say otherwise is damaging and needlessly consumerist. To sell it at a fixed one-off price and make sound business sense Scirra would have to hack the product into modules and sell it ala carte; which is terrible.
>
That's the strongest argument I've heard so far for a subscription model. It's understandable that the company wants to make lots of money from their product, but it's also understandable that the consumer wants to get value out of what they pay for. It's important to find a middle ground or someone loses. I really feel that the consumer loses when they are renting software tools.
The value doesn't come from the experience in using the tool. The value comes from the hard work the consumer puts into the game and creating something fun for other's to play. The recoup value is if you make money from those games. How many of the 120K registered users make more than $120 off their games? How many success stories does C2 have? How many people are getting their value out of paying once for C2? And now Scirra wants us to pay forever to use C3? Where can we meet in the middle to make it fair for the most people?
I never expected to make a penny with C2, which is why I paid one-off. Someone just told me they couldn't even play my excuse for a game cos it gives them a black screen because I had to compile it with Cocoon, because XDK/PhoneGap was too slow. I have no reason to believe C2 will come up with a cloud compiler any better than XDK, and I certainly don't expect it to reach speeds of Cocoon, even if it is more stable for the tradeoff.