Tom_v1

I just received the email notifying me that v2.1 is now available, and stopped by here to see if anything had changed on the activation front. It appears not. I didn't buy my license from the Microsoft Store. I don't care if your licensing scheme is compatible with the Microsoft Store, the Apple Store or any other hardware vendor's "store". This is the same path that Adobe travelled: 1. You can buy a perpetual license for Photoshop. 2. You can buy a perpetual license for Photoshop, but that license requires online activation. 3. Photoshop is only available on a subscription. And that old "perpetual" license? Well, we shut down the activation servers, so your "perpetual" license only continues so long as your current hardware and operating system install continue to function. I purchased Affinity Photo specifically because I wanted to get off the Adobe Creative Cloud merry-go-round. I was constantly being force-updated to new builds that introduced unpredictable new bugs. And I still have a couple of Photoshop projects that were created in CS4 that cannot be opened in the Creative Cloud versions. Fortunately, I still have a working CS4 install, so I can open those files.

I've owned and used Photo v1 for many years now. When I purchased the upgrade to v2 and discovered that it now requires online license activation I uninstalled it and had the purchase refunded. I've been down this road with multiple software companies over the years. Never ends well, and I'm getting off this train before it goes off the rails. Software piracy has been a horrible mess for the last 40 years. I have seen a multitude of schemes that tried to prevent it come and go. What they all had in common was that they failed to prevent piracy and they negatively impacted the legitimate paying customers. The question is: How many additional copies will you sell because of this online activation vs how many paying customers will walk away because of it?