Lots of folks can figure out how to pirate but fewer of them will actually do it if they have to visit the skeevier corners of the net, risk malware, and feel like a criminal instead of clicking on a different locale on your website and feel like they are cleverly getting a good deal. You don't want your offline software failing for lack of phoning home.Īn argument could be made that Jane and Bob could well pirate it too but friction matters. Desktop computers don't have location and people could trivially block the app from having access to location AND network data.

Next how do you keep Jane in Seattle and Bob in Houston from buying the poor market version? You can't really restrict it by language or locale people use all sorts of languages/settings in different parts of the world.

If 90% of your market has no problem paying why would you not charge full price? Parts of the world experiencing desperate poverty often not so coincidentally experience substantial inequality with the folks needing a professional tool not being so different economically from better off areas. Instead, their answer is to cease all development an support immediately. Stopping all new features but still releasing compatibility and security fixes is incredibly common in software when major versions change. They should have a deprecation plan in place for gradually winding down v1. They aren't the first company to have to walk that back a bit with major version releases. But at the end of the day, Affinity was marketed as the answer to subscription bloat. I also have a (quite) expensive Adobe subscription. I've owned all of the Affinity products for quite a while, so I've gotten plenty of value from them.

People like to point out that they've owned Affinity products for a long time, and therefore have gotten their value out of them. The bugs that already exist? Those aren't getting taken care of either. That means, if you bought v1 last week, you cannot expect any compatibility support moving forward. They are telling users that v1 is now completely unsupported. I'm not moaning at them about the price, but I think it's fair to consider what they are actually saying.

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