[PowerofEight]

I'm going to weigh in about this all the sudden change to nearly mandatory subscription and raising license costs of perpetual renewals and such.

Let's get one thing out of the way, there is no "industry shift to subscription licenses". There never has been. The people we should be blaming to some extent is Adobe, because we, the consumer allowed them to dupe everyone with their subscription model.

Back when Adobe Creative Suite was still only perpetual, it was very expensive and unaffordable to the everyday computer user. Their software suite cost literally thousands of dollars and so it became one of the most heaviest pirated softwares of all time. Thus Adobe lost a ton of money. With the whole world finally on broadband, Adobe shifted to a subscription model for a monthly fee. This meant people got what they needed, and Adobe got to make up for all the YEARS they weren't getting paid.

People complained, but it didn't matter, they paid the subscription cost anyway and thus it became "successful". Since then, everyone jumped on the bandwagon. Microsoft, Apple, you name it.

Because of this, us, the consumer ends up paying for it dearly. Companies can slow down update releases to almost a halt, and it doesn't matter, you still have to pay to keep using it. I hear what hell subscriptions are because a company a friend works for pays $16,000 PER YEAR for Adobe Cloud and has been paying for the last 6 years he said. $16,000 a year folks. Just to RENT a piece of software. If they could buy a perpetual license they would in a heartbeat to stop the bleeding.

Avid knows they are the industry standard, and quite frankly we can all see where this one is going. It took 6 months to get a new release out, granted, it probably did take some massive rewriting of the code to accomplish this 2019.5 release.

What if car companies shifted from being able to buy a car to rentals only?

I can understand the casual Pro Tools user getting a subscription.. maybe they don't need it every day. But perpetual users DO. If they force everyone eventually to surrender their perpetual licenses there is no telling what the ramifications will be.

They could also do a perpetual freeze, meaning version 2019 will be the last version you can purchase a perpetual license for and then force subscriptions for 2020+. The same way you can buy CS6 perpetual, but of course you wouldn't be able to open any projects created in Creative Suite.

The only reason there was ever a "successful" subscription model is because consumers DIDN'T SAY NO TO IT. However, let's call it what it really is, its "guaranteed revenue". You get nothing, and companies get paid with a constant stream of revenue.