I was 100% against monthly fees but now I defend them with 100% conviction, and here is why...
Keeping up quality online content and thousands of high quality servers running daily, assuring all gameplay goes smooth for thousands and thousands of players is quite expensive, is not the pledges and game purchases that will be insuring that quality continuously for months and years
A company has only 2 choices
1 - Ask for a monthly fee, assuring payment equality for all gamers, bringing free updates and avoid too much of a grinding for ingame resources
2 - Bring on micro-transactions that will degenerate everything, give advantage to bigger wallets and forcing devs to create horrible grinding, promote grieffing against grinders, launch very expensive contents and impose many paywalls to force people to get fedup and go pay for micro-transactions
I'm addicted to GTA5 Online and if you check on youtube about shark cards you will see what happened to an once great game
If your online maintenance income is micro-transactions you must force people to get tired and bored with grinding or else you go broke, so yes, monthly fees are the way to go
And please do not answer me people should not be lazy to grind - On GTA nowadays you spend half time and half stress working at Macdonalds to pay for micro-transactions than actualy grinding ingame for the same currency amount, and Im not exagerating at all, I actually did the math, and that is if people grind in teams, not solo