A get where you are coming from, but my perspective when I was younger was that I could spend $15 a month to play this basically limitless game or spend $50-60 per game that would be a 40-50 hour experience. So for me, the value of that subscription was huge.

I think if modern games stuck with subscriptions without other mtx, that puts the most incentive on making a good game that is worth playing for a long time. But all the sub based games also have mtx these days, and there is also the incentive to make things just a little worse by default and offer a paid item to ease that a bit, the whole “pay for convenience” thing.