Lifetime could be 6 months, could be 6 years. The latter is probably impossible and a rebrand could nullify it.
Be honest about what 'lifetime' actually means, write it into a binding contract (yeah, 'binding' is difficult) and I might consider it.
But since everything is now a subscription, we need a new term that signals "one-off payment".
The confusing part is whether or not the devs must provide a lifetime of updates, which is unlikely, but also an unreasonable expectation.
Hence, lifetime means: buy once, use as long as you have a device that supports the software, get all updates for free, as long as the developers keep providing updates. Could stop tomorrow, could stop in 10 years, when they announce a new app. Depends on the developer.
I wouldn’t have minded as much if they hadn’t taken every single complaint about Pixelmator and made it a feature on the new product instead of a fix in the old one.
Makes me steer people to Affinity every chance I get.
Lifetime licenses always mean the thing you’re buying, not all its future updates. Affinity just did the same thing, came out with a paid 2.0. I think it should be that way, all “free {x} for life” deals end with you getting the absolute minimum that’s arguably {x}.
Besides, Pro is actually a huge remake and expansion. I’d guess only 10% of its code came from the predecessor, compared to 90% for normal big updates like Affinity 2, and 99.99% for Photoshop.
I see no problem with making genuine new features something that is brought out in a versioned, paid update.
But turning a deaf ear to QoL requests because in secret you’ve decided to use them as a stick to force people onto your v2, and just see the complaints (= customers) as free research.. that just makes you a grubby little company.
Let’s say it’s 20 lost sales per enthusiast (10 directly, 10 from second order effects). 2500 enthusiasts that you have made your enemy. That’s 50 000 lost sales.
If you don’t have market capture, don’t be an asshole to your customers. It’s just bad business. I’ve done my part and sent at least 2 dozen people to Affinity over the years, if not more. Hopefully others did too.
Edit: your hammer example is absolutely terrible because you cannot patch everyone’s hammer remotely for cheap. If the surface of the hammer is so shiny it reflects the sun too harshly, you can’t just send a patch that lowers the reflectivity.
Maybe communication is a root issue here. I think both of us could agree that they should make sure people know before buying whether they’ll be getting updates, and for how long.
I do remember some people being upset that Pro wasn't just a free feature enhancement to Pixelmator when Pro was announced, though.
I've been revisiting old games I wrote 35 year ago (rewriting them with modern API) and it is the lowly Pixelmator that I have been using near daily. (In fact was just using it this morning.)
Besides occasionally foregrounding its palette windows when it is in the background, I find it fully capable for pixel-editing.
I’ll probably pay $99 for this app in large part to reward a dev for giving users the option to pay upfront.
I don’t mind paying 3-5x the annual subscription cost to get a paid-up license, and the “pay once, pay again if you want new features released after your first year” seems pretty fair. But $50 a year, ever year, into perpetuity for, say, a weather, calendaring or Twitter app seems pretty stupid to me.
Expecting lifetime updates with your lifetime license seems weird to me. That‘s not a realistic expectation.
but really, that's how software all worked back in the 90s, and it was fine. I bought Corel 5 in the 90s for $200 or whatever, and it worked great. If I wanted new features or other substantial changes, I was willing to pay for a new version.
The way I see it, there are 2 options: either you buy software "as is" and can use it forever, but you don't get free access to updates (or get them up to certain point of time), or you pay for a subscription. People who bought old versions of Pixelmator or Photoshop or 1Password can still use them (I have 1Password 4 on one of my devices), as long as the system updates won't render it useless.
It's the subscription model that is poison.