I could be wrong here but acording to my calculations even if everyone who plays paid it still wouldn't be enough to run the game, plus not everyone would have enough to pay so they would lose a huge percent of the current population that may or may not have made a ocasional credit purchase.
I'd be in favor of a subscription-based model -- as long as it also included a way for players with the means to pay to gift-subscribe a random nonsubscriber. (With a system in place so that nonsubscribers could do SOMETHING in order to register and show their continued interest, and therefore that only active nonsubscribers who would USE their time would receive it.)
i would be in for subscription only, i'm curious tho why there wasn't more marketing of this game? i understand that in beta there prob wasn't a huge marketing push, but after it was opened up - i never saw ads or anything for this game. if one of the issues was not enough players then...were they just relying on word of mouth?
With less players, koo, the game would require a large amount less maintenance to run, as less servers and staff would be necessary. And with this model, the number of players would severely drop, making both costs to run and net profit increase.
There are fixed costs, and costs that scale with user numbers some other way than linearly. I think that too many of the costs involved in running Glitch are fixed or have a significant fixed portion for the per-user price of running it with a small userbase to be reasonable. (For instance, no matter how few users there are, the creative work needed is essentially the same. And no matter how few users there are, there have to be at least a couple full time user-support people to keep the chat-spamming down to a dull roar and unstick people's stuck quests and so on, in different time zones.)