It's not the same. As I said I'm okay with buying the next version every now and then—which makes the same price mostly—what I am not happy about is that my "tools" are becoming "services". There is a different feeling of buying a hammer, and going to a shop and paying them to use their hammer each time. The pricing is the same, but I can no longer just open up my offline Affinity and do what I want to, now it has to connect to the internet and take many seconds each time to "verify my license". The feeling ruins it. This knowledge that everything is a service and anyone can flip the switch and ruin your whole workflow like a pizza shop is not good, one has to be able to make their own pizza even if the shops felt like closing. A creative tool must not be a service, it has to be like your kitchen, your own.
Okay so you wanted a different kind of subscription (based on major versions). That’s different from the guy I’m replying to who wants to Buy Software And Just Use It. He can do that with v2. Never needs to pay a penny again.
All right, well you've got it. There's just no corresponding new version. Just like there are no more albums by Prince. I suppose you were lamenting there were no more songs by Prince, which is fair. I, too, feel that void.
Except for the odd fact that now you've got the software without having to pay.
Cue the old adage that if you're not paying for something you're the product not the customer...
Though in this case the biggest danger is being the training material creator used to train its models for its paid generative AI offering. I would assume people are monitoring the privacy policy and terms of use to know when such a change would happen - if it isn't so already, I haven't checked those documents.
As for me I'm happy to stick with v2 for as long as it can function on computers I own and use.
