My take on this is that we're allowing the publishers to charge like we're purchasing a product but sell like a subscription. The difference is, with a subscription, there's a known time factor. You subscribe on an annual basis and they either deliver the product for the entire year or they have to repay for whatever they didn't deliver. What we end up with instead of a "lifetime" subscription paid up front but with an unknown as to what that lifetime is while also having that lifetime be shorter for later subscribers. You buy early and you get a ten year subscription but you but late and you only get a one year subscription but in neither case do you know what subscription you actually got.

Sadly, I think we have to put a lot of the blame for this on gamers. Yeah, I know, that's not a popular opinion but the thing is we let them do this. They started with their microtransactions and we complained but we bought anyway. We made it profitable. They started with always online single player games and we complained but we bought in anyway. They started with invasive drm and we complained... you get the idea.

I once had a boss chide our team because we had a 10% return rate on trouble calls - 10% of issues we fixed needed to be addressed again within a month. He asked us to name any company that could get away with a 10% failure rate. My response: Xbox. The 360 had somewhere around a 50% failure rate for the first year or two. True, they would replace the failed units and they even specifically extended their warranty for that particular issue but you still had people returning their units for a new one that would go on to have the same problem and then repeating until they finally got a good one. And each failed Xbox meant time. Time you had to wait until the replacement got to you. The 360 still went on to be the most successful console of its generation.

Bottom line: gamers are suckers who have repeatedly shown the industry that they'll put up with anything. They'll complain, they'll have their online temper tantrums, they'll burn the publishers in effigy, and then they'll buy the next game and do it all over again. Why should the publishers change? They've been shown again and again that they don't have to.

Now I think I've seen some progress more recently. I haven't been a part of the gaming scene very much for the past decade or so (specifically because of how screwed up the industry was) so I don't exactly have my finger on the pulse, but from what little I've seen, it does look like gamers have started to actually put their money where their mouths are. So maybe we can finally do something about it. But we're going to have to show the publishers that we won't settle for a bad deal if we actually want them to stop giving us one.