| This seems like a long winded mess of anecdotal opinions and assumptions, that still somehow ignores the real reason for subscriptions. The list of acceptable uses for subscriptions is silly, subscriptions are always acceptable if your customers accept them. And the authors refusal to try subscriptions out of a fear that short term revenues will decline is an abandonment of long term thinking. And I am not a subscription apologist either. I just wrote a long post on the need for Apple to build tools for selling upgrades as good as the ones for selling subscriptions. The real driving force for subscriptions is the need for recurring revenue to support a software business, especially bug fixes and enhancements. The one time sales model never worked in software, it was a path to oblivion that was quickly abandoned or never used by the vast majority of PC developers. That’s why the PC software market became dominated by maintenance plans and paid upgrades. If you had a good product, and offered valuable new features in an upgrade, your users would be more than happy to buy the upgrade. That matched revenues better to costs, allowing software companies to keep more employees on staff to actually improve the product. When Apple came out with the iOS App Store, they broke the upgrade model. Existing users get every update for free. Releasing a large update as a separate product means it can’t access the existing user data because of sandboxing, and it can’t be priced at a discount for existing users. There are workarounds to all these problems using in-app purchase and data export/import schemes but they are costly in developer time and offer a poorer user experience than traditional upgrades did. I’m convinced if Apple had an upgrade purchasing system as easy to implement as subscriptions, developers would abandon most of their subscriptions and replace them with upgrades. |
It's hard to make money off of features you've improved substantially but most of your users bought four years ago. Except games, where you just change the name and a bit of the story and sell it again.