Brian 
Someone run a welfare check on Clip Studio Paint.
It’s now been seven days since they have ghosted their followers on social media after the backlash of going to a subscription model where you can buy the license, but still have to pay for updates.
Either they’re waiting for things to blow over, or they’re reconsidering their position. I imagine they’re waiting for things to settle down confident that the subscription model is going to bring in more revenue.
More users would be okay with the situation (even if they weren’t going to subscribe) if CSP laid out that changing economics in the software business made this necessary. They clearly didn’t understand who their user base was.
A large swath of hobbyist and aspiring professional artists made up a lot of people who have dropped money on the perpetual software license. Krita and others are going to see a bump in users. There are open source options, after all.
CSP failed to sell their subscription model as an upgrade. If you were getting MORE that would soften the blow. But instead their press release left long time users with the frustrating understanding that if they opt out of the subscription model (they’re calling it an update pass) they lose updates and revert back to the last perpetual licensed version of CS that they had.
So users are paying more for the same. In a time of inflation and shrinkflation and rising prices all over, this is a bad time to hit their broad base of casual users with yet another expense. But then, I’m sure CSP has rising expenses too. Even so, this strategy so far looks like, at the very least, a strategic blunder.
What would a better option for rolling this out have been? How would people have better responded to something like this? Let me know what you think in the comments.
