I tend to wonder if subscriptions force a FOMO cycle. To keep you playing and paying, they have to bullet-train players to max level and keep you in a carousel of the latest content at all times. That leaves the rest of the game a hollow shell.

I’ve been getting back into Guild Wars 2 recently, and one of the draws is the tolerable monetization: a new expansion every few years, that you can buy on your own schedule (i. e. when they go on sale), and the level cap is effectively frozen, so you can go idle between releases without a meaningful loss of place. The game has to service even the non-expansion users, and the game design explicitly benefits this: the difficulty and rewards scale so that almost all areas of the game are still worth exploring once you’ve hit level cap, and they can put activities across the map rather than cramming it all in the latest zone.