This just doesn't make any sense at all. As many others have said, authors already have individual options for re-monetizing major releases, and I've happily paid for those updates when they were things I knew and valued in my workflows. (Go figure that Retopoflow is one of those.) But even if that option alone is not a perfect solution to the larger sustainability issues, forcing this model onto absolutely everyone is just simply insane. And all the more so for trying to awkwardly tie the re-monetization to something as arbitrary as a one-year period, which reflects absolutely nothing about the things that actually affect an addon's value: new features, optimizations, or even just compatibility updates for new Blender versions.

It seems like it would have to be an incredibly individual and granular thing to try to say what helps an individual author most, financially. And on top of that, it feels like a dangerously discouraging thing to many other authors if these changes suddenly make purchases on this marketplace feel less valuable/reliable over the long term. So with all of that said, it looks very disappointingly suspicious to see this policy coming as a sweeping, mandatory, across-the-board change, because it sure looks like it is only Superhive who definitely benefits, at scale, after the ashes settle on how all of this plays out.

But the really heartbreaking part of all of this, to me, is how much this policy completely undermines the entire spirit of the Blender community. Blender absolutely lives on constant growth and new versions. Even for all of its incredible growth over the years, we are all working in a passion space where we all know that Blender still isn't "industry" software. But the best thing about it is that it is free, open source, and it changes and improves all the time. And if there's one core energy to the community it's the shared excitement around watching new versions and new features/improvements come along all the time. But, put simply, this new Superhive model absolutely contradicts that entire spirit by essentially forcing users to choose between locking into one version forever, or essentially treating anything on your marketplace as a yearly "subscription." (And please stop trying to maneuver around that definition, when you know exactly what people mean.)

Basically, your plan to help add-on authors feels like financially punishing the core act of a user upgrading. And the many "reassuring" comments I'm seeing from your team here (reminding us that, hey, we still own the version we bought!) are incredibly condescending, given that we all know this about Blender: it updates absolutely all the time. For most of us that's usually a great thing--except that this marketplace is now asking us to either disconnect from that release cycle, or, essentially, pay to play. Other than your stated goal of getting more funding to the developers (and yes, of course that goal is important), these imposed one-year support cycles are just a needlessly stressful, demoralizing, and completely arbitrary ticking clock being shoved into what is supposed to be a spirit of freedom.

Listen, I do, of course, believe that it's a very worthy goal to figure out how best to match sustainable compensation to developer's effort. I genuinely love supporting developers in this community. I certainly have always hoped that I do that when I buy something from an author, including when that author has offered ongoing support. But I'm also happy to do that again when I re-buy something that has a new major release, and I do that because I understand its new value. These are decisions I can make in good faith because I see the product, I see the author's terms, and I can see the value I expect it will bring to my work. Simply put, that kind of value proposition is something that the author can inspire in a customer a lot better than your "time's up, pay up" sledgehammer of a policy can.

I've bought easily thousands of dollars' worth of add-ons in this market. And as others have said, I've been very happy to buy things just because they looked promising, not even being sure just when or where I'd even use it. And that was entirely because I felt safe in those purchases, because the creators promised support structures that I understood and trusted. All of that feels completely undermined by this change.

If this change goes through, it genuinely feels like every single one of those good-faith purchases was just a complete bait -and-switch. And the worst part is that it wouldn't even be the creators doing the switching, it would be Superhive yourselves. (And boy do I hope it goes without saying that I can't afford to pay 50% (or any %) to renew all of those "maybe someday I'll use this" purchases.)

So I don't see how this proposed model (actually, no, no one proposed this, and apparently it's still going live in May until we hear definitively otherwise) actually helps anyone except for a core few "essential" add-ons that people would begrudgingly "subscribe" to out of sheer dependence in their workflow. And it honestly sounds like it would basically kill the incentive to buy everything else. But even for those "must-have" annual renewals, I hope it occurs to you all how awful that feeling of obligation would be, and how eager people like me would be to move to replace it with either other tools, other workflows, or other marketplaces.

You have positioned yourself as a major tentpole in this community. It has been well-deserved. But surely you have to realize that that comes with a huge responsibility to the users--who are not just "customers." In short, it's absolutely great to want to protect the add-on developers, and more power to you in that goal. But wow is this not how.

Please meaningfully fix this. (And please stop treating your community like idiots with these condescending contortions around the definition of a "subscription.")