The future is now. I'm just waiting for the official announcement.
As I mentioned in another post, I'd be willing to pay Valve $50/year for Steam (possibly with a pro-rated discount of $10 for every $50 in new game purchases over the year). I don't mind paying a subscription for something that saves me time and money, and on-line servers and bandwidth aren't free.
The consumer is still living in a world of up-front costs. But the reality is that up to 85% of software engineering cost is sustainment engineering, post-release costs. Businessmen and women have been trying to figure that out for years.
The on-line realm is where some consumers are willing to pay. The MMORPG subscriptions actually feed a lot of development money. There are other options too.
Unfortunately, the only place I've seen where pure, 100% sustainment engineering has worked has been in the Enterprise Linux space. SuSE first proved that IHVs, ISVs and enterprise consumers were willing to pay a lot more for 5+ years of ABI/API compatibility, which is costly to do in the open source world as the trailing edge software is farther and farther away from leading-edge. Red Hat quickly followed, and built a completely profitable model (SuSE was never profitable for Novell, Novell's other products subsidized it), and now offers sustaining up to 10 years. On the flip side, leading edge development is still done by the same, paid developers, in a greater community (with others, paid, unpaid, competitors, etc...). It's a 100% flip from traditional commercial software, instead of paying for new features, you pay for trailing edge sustainment. Red Hat's CEO flat out stated in 2008 he doesn't think home consumers should ever have to pay for their software, and re-clarified it's because he doesn't know how to make money in home consumer software (especially since Red Hat's margins are 1/10th those of other, commercial enterprise software companies for the same functionality).
I'd really like to see this happen in the entertainment world. It would work out best for both consumers and developers, better service for consumers, more sustainable models for developers. Unfortunately, I don't know how to do it. Only the on-line services model seems to be accepted in a subscription form, and even then with many asterisks. E.g., Steam, "I already paid for my game" (yet Steam costs Valve money to operate annually). It might literally be a "subscription" to a development house, who produces multiple games, not just a single game. The Downloadable Content (DLC) seems to be a move in this direction, and I wonder when we'll see "free" game engines, but you pay for the "playable content"?