It does superficially make sense, but uh nobody else does that and I think it's pretty obviously a bad idea. World of Warcraft does not up their subscription fee every time they release an expansion. You just have to pay for the expansion itself and then keep paying the same subscription fee. A subscription fee for an online implementation of a physical card game is already a tough sell for a lot of folks. But a subscription fee that might go up at any time? Oof.
The subscription fee only goes up if you want more stuff. Or I mean, if it goes up due to changing realities the way that any price goes up, except when instead they lower the amount of peanut butter and put that big dimple in the bottom of the jar to try to hide this fact.
But I mean, I'm reasonable. Other fine options:
- online versions simply never get any further expansions; hooray, no-one misses out due to price outrage
- there are no further expansions; hooray, everything made it online
- no new expansions come out until the online version ceases to exist; hooray, new expansions happen despite the desperate need for any new content to be free online because something something World of Warcraft
Those are all fine. New expansions that we give away online, meh, I'd rather work on projects that the world pretends are worth something. I don't need you to understand; you aren't changing my mind; if people will be too unhappy that the price for "everything" goes up when there's more everything, well I have these fine three alternatives.
The subscription model wasn't my idea; I don't know how well it will do; it if fails we will put whatever effort into considering the matter Then. It is getting its shot. Any change that affected what people with the existing software would expect to get in 2017 can't possibly happen until 2018. You say "there's no server to keep running there;" I am guessing that's referring to costs? My understanding is that that's not relevant so maybe there's some significant misunderstanding there; you could ask Stef for clarifications on their forums, where it is so much more reasonable for people with inside information to be discussing these things.