Subscription is a business model used by a variety of online games, most especially massive multiplayer roleplaying games like World of Warcraft. The player signs up for the game either by buying a retail release or downloading it for free and then, after a trial period, pays a monthly fee to its publisher. Subscription is one of the two main business models in online games, the other being freemium. It is considered to have some positives and negatives.
On the positive side it encourages a perception that the game is fair, which can be important to some subcultures of players. It also tends to encourage long term loyalty. On the negative side, it treats all players as the same and so your game may not be monetising its strongest fans well enough. It is also difficult to convince players to subscribe to a game, particularly if they are already subscribing to another game.
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