Why all the complaints? Only one change is needed.

[Jamesx1]

V2 is still a great deal and Serif does excellent work to provide a true alternative to Adobe.

But seriously, just make one change:

The 40% discount for existing users should not have an expiry date. Putting time pressure on V1 users is not a good call. Surely this is simple to implement. This gives everyone plenty of time to organise their own transition to V2, and everyone can also settle down with reactionary comments as they come to see that Affinity is a great deal. They should ask themselves - "What if Affinity didn't exist at all?"

(Having said that, let's talk Linux availability....haha kidding - I know no one wants to talk about that anymore. Should run in VirtualBox Win10 no problem, right?)

[walt.farrell]

As Serif have said elsewhere, the problem with that idea is that they cannot identify all of the V1 users. They know the users who purchased directly from them, but do not have a guaranteed way of knowing the users who purchased from Microsoft or Apple, and they would be treating those users unfairly. So they have chosen to treat everyone (old, and new) the same, rather than mistreating one (or two) segments of their existing community of users.

[Jamesx1]

Understood, but I am assuming that it is not actually that hard to create a simple checkout or account function that can validate against the licensing server whether a valid V1 license exists or not.

If this is impossible for some reason, then just do it for direct purchases.