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Barewolf That Brad Pitt reference has nothing to do with a business model...
The audience gets a price, e.g. theatre ticket and all the revenue has to pay for all the expenses. How the revenue gets split between producers, actors, staff is of no concern to the audience. Qidian has to handle the total revenue and pay the translators, authors, devs and so on. The only benefit of the current system is, that you can easily say which novels are the cash cows. But would they take off novels that aren't cash cows or rising stars? That would be the doom, because such platforms live of variety.
If subscription wouldn't work here because of splitting problems, why does it work for netflix, amazon, and hundreds of other platforms? The total model has to be profitable not just a few novels.