I think a subscription model just doesn't fit with the use case of a game engine. You work on a game for potentially *years* at a time without releasing it, and need to maintain your ability to work on the project, save old versions of the engine so you have at least some semblance of version control, and have a static work environment that wont change in any way so that you can always make updates, access source files etc.
Being browser based already opens up construct 3 to all kinds of issues with the browser engine misbehaving and potentially screwing up potentially years of work, but to have to pay just for the privilege of working on your project is really not something a serious developer would consider acceptable. The idea of being locked out from your tools is something anyone using Construct 3 will become aware of, even if they aren't right now. Construct 3 isn't enterprise software, yet you're expecting individual persons to throw money at it as if they're businesses who can afford the fixed cost and write it off as an operational fee.
I cant afford to pay the subscription fee. I might potentially use the product once every few months, it's just not justifiable. I think a lot of users who would have gotten Construct 3 as a 'toy' were it another normal piece of software they could install and open from time to time, wont anymore. 100$ to play around every couple of months is too much, and the subscription model makes you reluctant to work on anything that you might wanna get back to at a later date.
And as someone who STILL uses construct classic, I feel kind of burned that Construct 3 is moving further and further from what made Construct good in the first place. Construct 2, and now 3, still lack core usability features that would improve the engine significantly for serious developers such as storing object references, lists , SOL's, Arrays, in object variables, and building prefabs of objects in a general class based system rather than having to rely on the botched container and family features that always wind up requiring weird work arounds when structural changes have to be made. Instead we're encumbered with the overhead of storing UID's in other objects and having to a search over N objects every-time we want to make an object reference, so even building prefabs, constructors/destructors in events carries a severe overhead. The event engine/SOL system is great, it can be used for rapid prototyping and really quick development, but it needs improvements to actually be usable for performant code in a large game. The same issues that were in construct classic are largely unaddressed even in Construct 3. There needs to be more types than just string and numbers, and more control and object oriented paradigms implemented into the core workflow.
Construct 3 seems to want to be professional development software with a fee that's even steeper than Unity's, yet the features that have been added are largely unimportant to anyone using the tool as a professional developer. dictionary/array editors, the "real equation" expression feature that makes things more unreadable, the "work anywhere on any device" (really who will be able to code with any capability on the subway on a tablet/phone without a mouse or keyboard?), the useless cloud integration, all feel like additions that are meant to make the software appealing to the most novice of users, yet the pricing is set so that only serious professional users will pay it. It kind of feels patronizing to your own user base.
Why wasn't more done to actually appeal to advanced users if that's the audience the pricing targets? If that's not the audience you wanted, a subscription model, especially at such a high cost, is really not the right way to go.