A fixed-period licence?

One of the problems I see with the current licences (with most of licenses in general) is that the moment a new version comes, your program is outdated. That's sometimes quite an issue, since you don't know if you can upgrade your version for 6 months, one year or two years since the moment you buy the license on.

The new "hiring" system gives you one year, but the license vanishes after that time.

In my opinion, it would interesting to have a "fixed-period" license. Kind of "you buy the license, and then you get Pro version, including any update during, let's say, 12 months (or 18, or 24). After this period, you keep the license, but you can't update your version anymore unless you buy an upgrade".

 

That sounds exactly like what already happens.

 

Except you keep nothing after your subscription ends.

In particular:

 

Yeap, and if you get now the license for 4.x, you will have no license when Unity 5 arrives. The big problem with that is that companies usually are not that clear about their schedules and you never know how close or far is the following version to come, so you can buy a license now and find that must buy an update like four months later. In my opinion, a fixed period is better, this way you know that you don't have to worry about updating for X months and you're not guessing if the following version is gonna be released in a short or a long term. If you want to schedule a project, that's much better.

 

Well, I'd say, if Unity 4.x is a product you need today, then who cares if 5.x ships tomorrow, or in 1 year, or two years. As and when a 5.x ships it does not make your 4.x Unity useless, or out of date, or anything like that. You can continue to develop your title with 4.x, ship it and when it makes money, upgrade if that's what you want to do. It's exactly the same when Apple ship updated machines. Obviously I'd love to rush out and spend my money on a new machine, and then sell my current machine (so effectively that's like upgrading). Just my views.

 

Spot on. I'm still working on some projects in 3.x purely because that's what they were started in and there's been no reason to upgrade them yet. (Though a point in Unity's favour is that when we have chosen to upgrade projects it's always gone smoothly.)

 

I've been thinking of buying Unity Pro for some time already (I don't really need it right now, but just would like to have it), but the closer Unity 5.0 the less I want to buy 4.x. A two-year license would sound more attractive to me.

And I hate subscriptions of any sort. When I buy something I throw my money away and soon forget about them. Subscriptions don't let me forget about the money I've spent, am spending and will spend in the future.