No, those I'm calling victims are people like me, who would like to buy the update and own it, but are instead forced in a subscription - which if they ever have to stop paying for whatever reason (e.g. out of a job, medical bills, etc) they lose their access to the programs they've been paying for month over month for years.

A music program called Reason is a good example of the scumbuggery involved. It used to have $129 annual updates - which were already overpriced, as they had minimal changes, and more professional competitors like Steinberg with much bigger update deltas (new features, work involved, etc) charged much less for their annual updates.

Now, they switched to subscription, for $20/month ($240/year) where they give access to some extra plugins to entice you. But to force the user's hands (since they still offer the paid annual updates), they also bumped the annual update price to $200/year (without the extra plugins, the regular, already-overpriced-at-129 update).