Feels like the subscription model is an answer for popular games being free, which itself make a bank on the 1% who spend an enormous amount of money on in-game items. Seems like everyone wants to be Valve in a way or another, owning a platform while making a bank on transaction cuts rather than the content itself. I wonder how much of a conscious decision this was on Valve's part when they made DotA 2 free. At the time it seemed more like a user-grab from LoL and Garena private-servers, and the in-game items were more like an afterthought that came from modding tools.