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.