[zenbiddist]

When I first encountered BBO I was surprised and impressed that it was completely free. As I recall, BBO was founded off the back of some large donations. It was doing a great job of revitalising bridge and connecting people from around the world. As a youngster I played half my bridge on the site, as did most youth players I know.

I don't know any youth players who use BBO now. Why would they? One friend recently logged back in after a hiatus and said afterwards:
'BBO now resembles every other repulsive money-grabbing app out there. Stop shamelessly trying to milk our udders. I'm not a cow, I logged on to play bridge, f*ck off! Talk about the embodiment of the term ensh*ttification.'

Not the most diplomatic review, but the sentiment is shared by everyone I know who used to love BBO. BBO used to be above greedy and invasive tactics. That purity of mission was one of its greatest strengths. I doubt many previously-loyal users will feel confident to make smaller-scale donations at the moment, given BBO's recent direction. I imagine the path forward is probably large grants/donations given on the condition that BBO returns to its original mission.

[1992m]

surely no one is actually going to sign up for these ridiculous subscriptions. What an absolute bunch of greedy ***** tossers that run BBO these days.

[johnu]

IIRC, BBO's original owners and developers started BBO because they loved bridge, wanted to promote bridge and provide a place where people could play online, mostly for free. And eventually, with robots and tournaments, they found a way to make money.

At the time, the only real competition was OKBridge, which charged around $100 going back 30 years so it was really expensive at the time. Honestly, I didn't see how BBO's business model was going to work since the vast majority of players only play for free so don't really add to BBO's bottom line. Since then, BBO has built a hugely profitable robot empire with people paying to play in robot tournaments, with hosting ACBL and other national organization games and charging fees, and some of their own "gambling" games. And of course, they have signed up with all sorts of ad servers that inundate users with all sorts of ads.

The new owners of BBO love money, and see BBO users as cash cows to be milked for as much money as possible. I assume they did the math, and found that any ad money they get from their relatively small user base (huge for bridge, but small for supporting an ad based income company) didn't pay enough to support the cost of the servers for free accounts that don't contribute to the bottom line. Things like improving the robots isn't a priority because it is already a huge moneymaker for them. So better to shrink the user population down to people who are actually going to pay, which allows BBO to shrink their operating budget and make more profits.

[OldPlayr]

Building, maintaining, and running a bridge site with the quality of BBO is not cheap.

BBO is a bargain.