Want I want to know is why won't 
Tom or 
Ashley explain the sudden shift in business ethics. Why won't they explain why it's necessary for users not to own what they pay for?
There's several reasons:
- we're hosting the software in the browser, with a cloud service behind it. I'm not aware of any software or service that runs in a browser and is a one-time payment - it's just not economical given the running costs.
- we also provide other on-going hosted services like the new app building service. I'd also point out you get this service *and* the entire Construct 3 editor for less than the cost of PhoneGap Build alone, so I think this is actually a pretty good deal. We actually already run some on-going services for free with C2, such as the Scirra Arcade (which is chewing up tons of bandwidth these days!) and the multiplayer signalling server.
- the one-time payment model is risky in the long-term, especially since we don't regularly do the whole "new major version everyone has to pay for again" process. Scirra is currently sustained almost exclusively by new users buying C2 for the first time. If the flow of new users dried up, we risk going out of business - even if we have tens of thousands of active users. There's also the aspect that we're still supporting people who bought C2 five years ago at no extra cost, and this existing audience is getting larger.
- this is the way the industry is generally going, and some competitors are already doing it. It's harder to compete with tools that have on-going income when you only have one-off income with on-going maintenance costs, especially when there are various on-going services we're running.
I guess at the end of the day, if you absolutely cannot stand subscriptions, you can either stick with C2 or look for a different tool.
[quote:2ogl55k7]It's often thrown back in our face that we voted for multiplayer, but no one really uses it.
I don't think I've ever "thrown it back in your face" - I don't regret doing multiplayer, and it was actually a super interesting project to work on technology-wise. My main takeaway from that is that voting isn't always a good way of deciding what to do. I think people tend to imagine proposed features or ideas as magic silver bullets that work perfectly and have no downsides. The real-world is actually always a series of trade-offs and nothing is perfect. I even repeatedly emphasised that multiplayer would be difficult to use, and only to vote for it if you are willing to put up with that complexity, because there are difficult aspects of networking that can't reasonably be covered up automatically. Still, everyone voted for it. Then it seems not many people use it, and my best theory is... because it's quite difficult to use, since there are difficult aspects of networking that can't reasonably be covered up. So I haven't run any polls since then. That's pretty much the only fallout from my point of view. I don't blame anyone! I just think it's a curious aspect of asking people to vote for features.