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> It tended to be complaints from the countries where $99 is a huge amount...
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Not my issue with it.
> ...if my aim is to make money with games, then 99/year is downright laughably cheap!
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But you only make money if you actually end up fully following through with it.. and how many times does that happen with even people trying to release something? Probably less often than not.
For a lot of people with plans but not necessarily time/life stuff comes up (intermittent users), it's not a great value if you're not using it a lot of the year. (To say nothing of the ownership issue.)
Even for a subscription scheme, the annual buy-in still seems to me a crazy/terrible choice. It's a bad fit for intermittent users. (This is not like Spotify or something where you can find time to use the service pretty much anytime). If not month to month, at least a 6 month option should be available.
I'm not really clear on what you mean. If your aim is to make money, then how can you not fully follow through?
If making money is my aim, then I'm not making games for myself. I'm essentially making products for my potential customers. To find these potential customers I would need to do some market researching. Then I would have to start marketing right away to keep these people interested. All this would bring me monthly expenses without even opening Construct! If I would not follow through at this point, I would lose money AND damage my credibility.
Now as a hobbyist, I would essentially be creating the games for my own enjoyment. This is a completely different approach to game making than the example before, because the end goal is different. In this case, I can understand not wanting to pay 99/year for the reasons you've mentioned. But isn't the free version there for this? As far as I know there hasn't been any details released regarding the limitations of the free version. It would be interesting to know what the limitations are in that one.