I paid on average $700 each year, for about 5 years, to Autodesk for maintenance of Softimage ( 3D modeling and animation ).
That is pretty much the same as subscription. Gave me continuous access to all new features and so on.
In those 5 years I think they added some 3D cube in the upper right corner which you could click on and rotate to rotate the view. Never used it because you had always been able to do exactly the same thing by holding down the S key and using your mouse to rotate.
So about $3500 for that. Then they decided to kill off Softimage and tried to force everybody to switch to their other 3D programs, Maya or 3DS Max. Fortunately enough people complained about it, so they decided to let us use Softimage perpetually.
Right now they only offer subscription and prices are insane, so I quit the whole thing, but at least I can continue to use the latest version I had registered when I let my maintenance contract expire. There is pretty much no functional difference between Maya 2018, Maya 2015 or Softimage 2015 vs. whatever year . It's all the same thing. That is why they and a lot of other companies want subscription. There simply isn't anything left to add to warrant upgrade prices, so they want to force you into software rental instead of ownership. Same for audio software, video, whatever. It all peaked a long time ago. It is all the same thing now as it was 5 years ago or even 10 years ago. The only thing that's different is support for newer file formats, video resolutions and so on. Actual editing, modeling, animation, whatever software does is exactly the same. If you look at Construct 3 vs. 2 you will see pretty much the same thing.