I believe yourself and ultimately Nikos are missing the obvious.CDRMaker wrote:Hello everyone...
I believe many folks are missing the obvious.
I think that us, as paying users, don't give one whit about software protection schemes. It does nothing to benefit me, and it takes time away from development of actual features as opposed to this endless rat-race of chasing pirates (who, eventually, have proven over and over will win). Every minute we spend dealing with your licensing details is essentially "punishing" your legit, paying users. Pirates will just download a pre-packed torrent or what have you and continue on their day.
As near as I can see, outside of the priority support (which can be valuable to some users), the only feature "added" to Ultimate is one that was removed from Pro.
I just ran across this software this week and got the go-ahead from my boss to buy it today. I've purchased pro with lifetime, because I don't personally need the portable version. If I had done so previously I would be furious with this change.
If you want to add features, by all means do so. That's not what's happened here - features have been removed and then re-packaged into a more expensive tier. What is to say that other core features of pro or ultimate won't be removed and then placed into xplorer2 hyper-plus edition? Based on current behavior, users have no reason to expect this won't happen.
Further, you've now removed the value proposition behind the lifetime license. You've decided to create tiers above existing license levels and will be adding features to these tiers that won't be present in existing tiers. By doing so, you've pretty clearly demonstrated to your customers that the lifetime license isn't worth the paper it's printed on. Yes, you'll get updates to new versions, but new features or performance enhancements are being added to a new tier beyond what was already purchased. Of course, you are able to receive these new features too - for just a little more money. That isn't a lifetime license, that's just regular old upgrade pricing with a new name.