I just want to start by saying ; miss the old days of pre-digital products. You buy the game, you own the game. The ''game'', is literally in your hands. You're able to do whatever you want with what you have in your hands. Nothing will change it, re-design it, re-value it, ditch or patch some parts of it... Heck, even if the game has some gamebreaking bugs, this is all you have.
Now we have to deal with fishy people and their fishy actions.
I have over 7k hours in this game and if you were to check my steam account there's only 30 something achievements so far. I dont care and I dont play for the achievements. With all DLCs so far, the amount of possibilities in the game are limitless. Thats how I'm having fun with it. Because of that I bought everything related to EU4. Every single DLC out there. So if you were to make DLCs subscription exclusive [insert such lovely curses here]...
Some are arguing by comparing renting a flat or a car to this... Keks. Even going further ''Dont you work live like me? Salary to salary?''
People should know their rights better, sometimes with such deals in real life you're letting your rights fly away. I remember years ago a guy sued a company for such thing and the company came up with ''No you didnt buy the game, you bought the access to the game'' topkeks. Now that its digital-era anything can pass the EULA. And you guys cant do anything about it.
Let me give you an example, I have all the content packs and while creating a custom nation I dont have any access to any other model types than the vanilla ones. But I've paid the money, bought it! Dont have any rights? ITS JUST COSMETICS! keks. And mods would allow you to ''fix'' that are ironman incompatible.
Beside this nonsense I've said so far subscription is not gonna bring that much people in to the customer pool.
Imagine one, completely alien to strategy games = only to get a grip of this game would take 1 year in total.
Imagine one, familiar with strategy games = 9 months maybe?
Imagine one, familiar with PDX games = 3 months? Yeah but instead would buy the DLCs.
And without tutorial vidoes made by players on Youtube I cant imagine how long would it take for one to just learn the game.
And yeah you always have multiplayer option, play as Crimea march of your friends Ottomans, problem solved.
In short term learning curve for this game goes far beyond subscription plan which means buying the game and DLCs much more logical.
You could've listen to your community PDX. You could've lower the DLC prices.
Here's some ''data'' for your ''telemetry''.