Still considering the lifetime sub, now that the offer is back. But what I think is crazy is, that you can order that now, in your account, but you still have to buy the client separately. I mean, what is gonna happen? I will get an illegal copy or so?? Doh.

For that price, the game could be included. Alternatively, if they are calculating with margins, charge 220 or 240$.

i have preordered the game from a "normal" webshop, and will receive my copy I guess on or just before launch day. Now, I am not desparate for early launch, or else i could cancel the preorder and get a d2d download, but wtf, if I were to pay now for a lifetime sub, i would expect to get into the game without buying it from somehwere else.

Yet another alternative could be to just sell the activation key in your account without all this buying from a retailer.

*shrugs*

just my 5 cents worth.

That's silly marketing. But I didn't really look into it because I wasn't too interested in a lifetime. Although, I miss my HG:L lifetime. Even then, it was the same, but they extended that one months into release, but they (didn't seem) to be selling nearly as many lifetime subs in HG:L as champions is.

I guess they want to milk you for that extra $50.

Listening to dev discussions from previous GDC's, profit projection is pretty cut and dry.  in order to justify printing X amount of boxed dvd's, they need to "assume" they will sell a certain amount of these boxes to make whatever profit it is theyre aiming for. 

Likewise, in order for the game itself to profit they need to project that for every box they sell, a person will subscribe for a certain amount of months to be profitable.  One of the quickest and easiest ways to do this is to sell a lifetime subscription to subscribers.  They sell their boxes, they can account for X amount of subscribers to have their subscriptions for 13 months and can more accurately project the games profit margin for the entire year.  Like most games that offer a lifetime sub, which isnt many, theres a very good reason they sell lifetime subscriptions and it has a lot to do with projecting that each boxed sale will grant them an average subscribed months.  If they cant make that profit by a certain quarter, they will lose money.  These lifetime subs give the investors a nice warm and fuzzy feeling seeing the game profit instantly.  It also allows money to be re-invested into the game very quickly.

ye, I am with you on the business part.

I was just ranting a bit from the practical consumer perspective.

A big reason they didn't bundle it together is the way it is set up now lets all their merchants (Gamestop, Best Buy, Amazon, etc) still sell the game box, without having to "compete" with Cryptic itself for the "best deal". These merchants don't care what subscription style you choose, only that you bought the box from them. This is why D2D prices tend to be  AT LEAST as high as box prices, and usually with no perks or few perks. Merchants don't like the producer of a product competing with them (since they can undercut the merchant because of "no middle man").