The community around Trackmania Nations is not terribly keen about the upcoming game’s business model, since it appears to be set up that the base game is free, but the track editor and the like (a major feature of the series) will require a subscription. But wait! A new Ubisoft post on fan site Maniaplanet has clarified that it’s not a subscription service after all. You just have to pay for access, and then you get access for a while, and then when you stop paying you don’t have access any more.
This is apparently different from a subscription in some fashion.
Needless to say, this description of how a service which describes exactly how a subscription works while claiming it’s not really a subscription did little to mollify fans, most of whom are still rather annoyed at… well, the business model described above. You may note that similar attempts at describing a subscription as “not a subscription” have been tried before, notably with Bless Online back in 2018. There’s not much time left for the model to be substantially changed, as the game releases on July 1st, but it should be clear that calling a subscription “paying for access for a limited time” doesn’t really fix it.
