It's good for consumers now, bad for the industry and consumers in the long run.
It's simple math that you make more money on the high end selling your product at $60 if your series can sell over 2 million copies rather than earn some chump change scraps from a subscriptions. Subscription based games will encourage more GaaS styled games and will significantly lower the budget of titles in the future. Games will be made cheaply as possible to turn a profit.
Most people who work in the industry make their money off of bonuses from a game selling well. Subscription based gaming under a large umbrella will drastically reduce the amount of money that can potentially be made for high qualified individuals in the industry.
If you take that away then there's really no reason for them to work in the industry anymore.
Iwata warned developers time after time about devaluing their product.
Even though I did bring up cancelling and taking advantage of month-by-month to save money. I think the expectation for a company like Ubisoft is to eventually raise the price when the value increases; and that people actually subscribe for an entire year and in turn end up spending more (or Ubisoft gets more dollars) on a subscription than they likely would have spent the entire year buying 1-3 games. More people would subscribe yearly then try to save money by unsubscribing all the time. Most of Ubisoft sales on PC likely come from STEAM (who takes a sizeable cut) and PC games are often whored out for big discounts before they even come out or shortly after; so it's not simply $60x2million . Ubisoft could actually end up making more money doing both than they would just selling games individually depending on what customers end up actually doing. We don't have a crystal ball so we'll have to wait and see. For third party studios, I don't know what actually deals are in place but I'm guessing it's a lump sum of cash (like what happens with TV shows and subscription services) and any money on individual sales. I would think for the small studios they would be safer/happier for them to have Ubisoft (or Microsoft) give them a lump sum of cash to be able to stick it on their service (if that's what is actually offered) than for them to hope they get a lot of sales because you don't know for sure if you'd actually sell 2 million copies and if it'd all be at full $20-$60 (before STEAM's cut and all that). If that's what is actually offered to these studios it's a risk/reward thing.
The bonus part is interesting though; I didn't know bonuses were expected/commons.
I personally really like the subscription model because I want to be able to try games to see if I'll actually like them and I don't really want to keep using the Steam refund.