There was some low hanging fruit for companies to create subscription plans who shouldn’t have been adding them. The more subscriptions your target customer has, the harder it is to convert them on the new one. For the business side the ceiling is a lot higher, but for consumers there is a very low limit.

Each market is different, but when I look at an area like Photoshop or Illustrator, the competition keeps getting better. In some areas they aren’t even competing.

The workflow of a game artist will have them going through a bunch of different products to get to an end result. A lot of those steps can have alternatives. If a vendor has some proprietary format that doesn’t work with anything else they never even get a user base.

If a subscription is funding continuous development, and th company is doing a good job, and I use the software daily it doesn’t bother me. If I use it twice a year, I’m going to be looking hard at alternatives.