tilgare
It sounds like you might be misinformed - a YouTube Premium subscriber watching your YouTube videos is worth, IIRC, 5 to 10 times more than an ad supported view for the content creator. I know a number of content creators have indicated as much for years - I wish I could cite a specific WAN Show episode from Linus Tech Tips who I’m certain has talked about it many times.
I’m not sure if you have checked out WoW lately, but it’s actually a pretty beautiful game. I think generally they want the tech specs to be a low barrier to entry for a game where they want millions of players playing concurrently. It also cannot be super heavy or things like raids and battlegrounds would chug.
Yeah, I get that. But the devs know what their average API calls are per user, seems like they would have landed on those numbers here; less frequent users likely subsidize power users to some extent. Or, like reddit, they could price it dynamically based on your usage too.
But you also might be right that it’s only affordable if ALL power users moved on. Probably fewer moved here than we’d hope/expect, but I’m sure it helped.
Why did everybody have to close down if costs are fully covered with a $2.99 subscription? I probably would have paid for reddit is fun at that price for myself and my wife. Assuming it stays ad free.