I've bought a single "lifetime" license and it was for Elite: Dangerous. Back in late alpha, you could pay $120 for access to all future expansions and updates. I think this would've been a great deal for anybody who likes E:D, but I ended up not liking it very much and was disappointed with the expansions. I still feel like it was a good deal, if only because I can jump into the game whenever I want to experience what's changed and it's cool flying around with VR and HOTAS for an hour, but I don't think I've gotten very much out of it otherwise.

I don't understand very much the appeal of lifetime licenses from the point of view of the seller. If you believe that your product will be good over time, you should only sell time-limited licenses. Am I missing something?

If I like the way the product works now, I want to use it that way indefinitely. Take Photoshop for example - if all I use is the brush and a bit of copy and paste, I don’t want to buy the new version and I don’t want to pay a subscription for upkeep of basic features. Just let me pay $30 for a license to use the tools the way they are now, for as long as I want. If they turn out a new version with better copy and paste, I’ll consider the upgrade(note that the term “upgrade” is why I would justify paying more over time).

A software like Microsoft Word - it’s mature, it’s not really getting better, why would I pay them monthly to use the same features?

My unRAID server software - I pay for unRAID once, and I expect my server to run until it dies. Why would I pay $20 a year or whatever just to keep my server running in my own house?

Services like Netflix on the other hand are turning out new content which is what I pay for. Content delivery is a different animal.