World of Warcraft

[whyBish]

Another way to look at it is that the company is being paid to host the server that you play on and store the data so that nothing can happen to it.

There is also the interesting idea of franchising out the server code. Let some other company license the server code for a fee, and then they can host it themselves with their own pay scales. This allows the price to match supply and demand locally rather than internationally. This is not even neccessary to be the model for the whole product lifestyle, but would be especially useful at the waning end of the lifecycle.