There is a reason why people hate the subscription model. It's the worst monetization from a consumers point of view, especially in the way Scirra has implemented it. Usually you at least only have to pay a small fee monthly so it gets spread out more, but with C3 you have to pay for a whole year upfront. I know there is a monthly option, but it is not actually an option since it's over double the price. If Scirra at least gave the option to sub for a year but pay monthly, but they don't even do that.
Then they also lock people into their subscriptions by making them lose their legacy subscription price if they want to pause their sub.
Those things are on top of the problems that every subscription based model has, like the fact that you don't own anything.
I will always be able to open, edit and export my old C2 projects, but not with C3, with C3 I lose all my work as soon as my subscription ends.
Yea maybe not literally, because I can still open it. But effectively, since I can't do anything with it, can't edit, can't export, nothing. Also if Scirra would ever stop existing for any kind of reason, you can't even pay for the privilege to get your work back.
And it's not like there aren't other options, you have to pay for Affinity products yearly too, but you own that software plus 1 year worth of updates. It's the same as the sub model, but at the end you own the version you paid for forever, you will always be able to open and edit the work you did with this version of the software.
This monetization model aligns much better with customers as well, if the new version doesn't have features customers are interested in then they might stick to the old version for a while or even skip a year.
It's not just the price, it's a bunch of issues that work great for Scirra but really suck for customers, and there are plenty of options of which each would make it less lopsided.
- Make it possible to have access to the versions you paid for even after a sub ran out. ( Give ownership over the things people paid for )
- Make yearly subscriptions payable monthly. ( Only having to pay a small fee every month is literally the only good thing about a sub and Scirra doesn't even allow that )
- Make the monthly option more expensive but not by over 2x ( Give people the option to pay when they need the tool and not waste money on something they don't use )
- Stop hiking the price only to lock people into their subs and to stop complains ( A dark pattern to make price hiking easy because it only affects future users, the people already paying stay on the same price and wont complain [ also makes it impossible for people to take a break from the sub in fear of losing their legacy pricing ] )
By switching from a sub based monetization to one-off payments that renew every year (like Affinity), Scirra could turn its monetization from the #1 reason why people don't recommend Construct, into the #1 reason why people buy it.
All while still basically charging the same money.
The difference is that it's a fairer model, with ownership and agency for customers.