Unlike single-player, offline games, there is a continual cost associated with maintaining and updating City of Heroes.  Your monthly subscription fee helps cover that. Therefore, your subscription pays for a number of different things:

Ongoing development and improvement of the game by Cryptic Studios. This includes additional game features, extra content, tweaks to game systems and much more. Since launch in the US, City of Heroes has had several major content updates with more due soon - each one dramatically expanding gameplay possibilities.

Maintenance of multiple game servers. Our servers - located in Europe - need maintenance, care and attention from our network team to perform flawlessly, regardless of how many players want to jump online at any given moment. They require round-the-clock attention to ensure any downtime is minimal.

European support staff. We have teams working on customer service and billing support, plus a full time Quality Assurance team working to test bug fixes and new game features.

Localisation of game content and support. City of Heroes is available to play in English, French and German - and just as importantly, our customer service and community sites (like this one!) are also available in those languages.