There should be a host component and a build component. Unless they increase the rate of development (they didn’t) it shouldn’t be a reason for a price increase.

This seems like they are using a marketing plan from the boxed software days to justify a price increase today. I wonder if there’s a 90s Microsoft person who was tasked with a back strategy after Google decided they wanted higher profits or slower growth or some reason that has nothing to do with reflecting value.

And that’s fair.. but worth pointing out I bought Diablo 2 Resurrected which I almost exclusively play online. Unless they release an expansion then I’m done paying them money.

I think there’s some places where SaaS makes a lot of sense. And storage costs and high data transfer volume…. It makes sense.

There’s a balance. Modern software leans too heavily to subscriptions though.