Got to agree with the majority opinion here.

There's normally roughly 2 years between TW titles coming out. That means the average player will play each one for 24 months. At $10 per month, that works out at $240 per title. That's six times the current cost. Add in an expansion after a year for a further $120 per year. Then consider that many of us go back and play the older titles occasionally. We could easily end up spending $400+ per year for the privilege of playing TW games.

Does anyone believe that the experience of playing bug-free TW games is worth that much?

Quote Originally Posted by CyanCentaur
Bug fixes don't sell games. Two years from now when CA announces their Next TotalWar Game, players will be a) drooling over carefully staged screenshots, b) drooling over bogus feature lists, and c) drooling over rave reviews written by crackheads.
I think you're only partly correct here. Two years from now, players will be "drooling over carefully staged screenshots". But, after the experience with M2TW, there will be a great deal more concern about the quality of the released game. A lot depends on the expansion planned for later this year: if it's largely clean, that will reassure many of the customer base; if it's not, CA will be in trouble.

If you go back to the comments on this forum around release-time, you'll find that people were asking whether the AI was any good and if likes/dislikes from RTW were still included. Then people started identifying and publicising bugs. That won't be the case next time around. The first thing people will be asking is: "is it bugged?" If the answer is "yes", a lot of people are going to hold off buying it until they know when the patches are due (or maybe even wait until post-patch).

Or, to put it more briefly, bug fixes do sell games: games these days are rarely bug-free on release but a company that provides timely and effective fixes will retain customers. CA has work to do in that area. Charging people to put right what you got wrong in the first place is not the way to do it.