It has nothing to do with billing. I was just pointing out that the second 'S' in 'SaaS' means "service" and once you get into services your margins often go down, that's why I (and other folks I know who've done SaaS at scale) disagree with Patrick on "economics of SaaS are impossibly attractive". I am willing to bet that Splunk's margins are way better than Loggly's.
Moreover, if you're smart & lucky and you manage to find a large niche with good margins running SaaS on AWS, Amazon will launch it as a service. Mr. Bezos is around & watching you :)
[EDIT] Besos -> Bezos :)
Not to be a jerk by pointing at a innocuous typo... but "Mr. Besos" put a huge smile on my face. Especially since "besos" means "kisses" in Spanish.
Mr. Kisses sounds even more ominous!
Let's just go with Besos from now on.
All AAA games have either micro-transactions, additional purchasable content, or both
I seem to recall seeing a report recently that Activision-Blizzard made more money from micro transactions than non-MTX revenue last year.
The payment model used in Starcraft 2 - a ancient game at this point - is sophisticated. A good illustration of the old game-economics model fused with the new. Oldest single player content is free; multiplayer is free; newer content and cosmetics are purchased in-game a la cart.
Instead of paying $45 one time, you might spend $120 over the course of a few years.
I suspect that will include game time tokens for WoW that can be then sold for ingame currency or used for gametime.
They also basically converted a big chunk of their subscribers to pure mtx players with that move further muddying the signal.
But yes, I recently read that games make more money in general than even movies, books and music and most of them don't have subscriptions but one time payments.