Man, they're giving you, essentially, 40 bucks. I think that's pretty much the opposite of terrible, given they never saw any of the money that went to MF.
Sure, they didn't but Jay and Donald hopefully did (unless MF/Goko screwed them over totally). Didn't Donald say that earlier purchases would be honored? They could just say to ShuffleIT, "we won't demand royalties on the expansions people already paid for in earlier incarnations of Dominion Online".
I don't play nearly enough to justify a subscription cost. I would pay the price of, say, a good full price Steam game, for a new implementation of Dominion. But it sucks to have to pay for the licenses all over again.
This business model is screaming "casual players not wanted!". Apropos steam games, my library of little-played/unplayed steam games suggests that casual-hostile pricing policies may not be the best policy.
I agree with this. I play sometimes, but it is a lot to spend if I play rarely.
I think what misleads people about this is that the term
subscription implies a recurring fee. It doesn’t actually recur here! You are actually only paying for fixed blocks of time, and you have to opt in to paying again. This is what makes it cheaper.
Say you get into Dominion for a week every 3 months. You can pay roughly $2 for access to all the cards for a week or so (the pricing includes a fixed transaction fee, so that you are slightly incentivized to pay for more at once, but ignore that for a bit). That would be like, $8 a year. Compared to the $48 cost of Dominion on Goko, and especially compared to the $100 cost on MF, you need to play for six years (or twelve years!) at that rate for it to cost you more. You spend more on a single take out meal than you’d spend on Dominion all year this way.
And you don’t even have to
plan how often you get into Dominion and do this on some schedule - all you have to know at the time of purchase is how long you want to pay for, until you either lose interest or are willing to pay the small transaction fee again to extend. You can be as conservative as you wish.
The only way this ends up costing you more (as a new player, compared to Goko and MF) is if you play for more than 1.5/3 consecutive years. At which point, you’re supporting an online service, that sort of makes sense.