The game is perfectly playable without a subscription. You can play it right out of the box with the ships provided, and you can design functional ship sheets with the free Excel workbook.

The subscriber area has a web app that manages a lot of what you’ll want for a campaign game, including map generation, victory deck generation and a spiffier ship design tool that produces prettier SSDs, and a tool that lets you upload art and make your own box miniatures.

It’s a value added service that costs us money to provide (in bandwidth costs) and costs us development time to make happen - and provides utility to players.

But the tactical game is fully functional without it, there’s a free Excel workbook that produces a printable ship sheet, and you can use any campaign system you like.

While I can understand paying people for ongoing development efforts, the game should then come at a slightly higher price with free/unlimited/non-expiring access to online resources.