Gamblejay The thing is, it is not sure we will actually see a price drop if it does not work properly. And the longer a system is in place, the harder it is to change it. If they shift to a subscription model now, it would not require much, but if they do it years down the line, people who have bought a lot of stones throughout that period may feel like they have been "cheated", which is never good press. Also, never once have I insinuated that they should not make money, they should, but though a reasonable model.
Also, when I talk about the west, i talk about the western market of online entertainment. I am mainly basing my opinion on having worked as a business consultant with several companies, and many have had trouble with their business models and trying to monetize. The best solution is normally to try and create a model to catch as many as possible. The current model is one where people like me (and you i assume), are the only viable customers as we can afford it, but many with low income/students (who is a large part of their market, as it is mainly young people reading), wont be able to afford it. You normally put people into 3 customer groups, who can roughly be translated to low, medium, and high revenue costumers (and then a 4th who never buy anything). With the current Qidan model, they are only appealing to the high revenue portion, which is often less than 1% of the customers. A way many companies gets around this, is for example to have multiple tiers of subscriptions, or offer many different "products" to accompany the main service (mainly seen in games). Qidan could easily do something similar, and I reckon they could even earn more than they currently do. They could keep all current SS systems, and then make an optional subscription of several tiers. For example, lets say 3 tiers of 5/10/15, where 5 gives you a certain number of chapters/spirit stones each day, and some additional vanity, like a badge on the forums/comment section, or the like. 10 to give even more chapters/SS and give a higher tier badge, along with additional energy stones and/or Power Stones. 15 bucks could then give unlimited reading, and an even higher tier badge along with the same/even more extra energy/power stones. They could then even in addition to that, add some vanity items, offer to sell complete e-books (basically just the exact same novels, but re-branded as an E-book, and even physical copies could be sold. These things would cost very little with the main product (the novel), already made.
It is possible that with the current system, some of the heavy readers (like myself), may spend 100+ dollars a month down the line, but those who tend to have that amount of some, also tend to have less income. Also, even those who can actually afford to pay that much, most likely wont as they simply can't justify it to themselves.
