I think piracy is one motivation, but I suspect it'd be going in this direction even without it: a yearly recurring revenue stream is just more attractive than

I think piracy is one motivation, but I suspect it'd be going in this direction even without it: a yearly recurring revenue stream is just more attractive than selling software. Companies in many industries prefer the "license/rent you something" model to the "sell you something" model, and it's mostly a question of whether culture/economics/technology/competition/law makes that practical. In the enterprise space it's long been standard: IBM won't sell you a mainframe outright, but rather rents you computing services. In the consumer space it's traditionally been harder, because it wasn't obvious why someone should pay you a subscription fee for a CD-ROM; though some companies did try to sell subscriptions to yearly updates. With a software delivery model more like a classic mainframe+terminal, it's easier to pitch the software-rental approach to consumers, so unsurprisingly they're doing so.