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Want to buy Classic License , have 90 days left on my current license .


Dave1967

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The classic license will save you money only in the very long run if you keep playing it more or less non-stop and if you don't upgrade. Conversely, if you play only for periods of four months (say, during the winter months) and with considerable pauses during the year, the by far cheapest option are the four-month time based licenses as you can upgrade anytime without extra cost, you can take pauses without paying for anything during that time, and you can always come back without penalty.

And how certain are you that you're going to play it for five years straight?

Conversely, if you are absolutely certain that you're going to play it on a regular basis for five years or more ... wouldn't you agree then that it's actually worth it?

 

Going by the more realistic one-year license, it's 50 bucks per year. A three-year period is still less than a classic license plus one upgrade that's to be expected in that period. After five years you might be ahead with the time-based license by maybe 50...60 bucks if a second major upgrade was released for the classic license owners. So, 10...12 dollars a year, effectively. That's two pints in a pub?

I'd call that a balanced price structure. The differences of either price model disappear in the blur of uncertainty that is colloquially known as "the future". Predicting the future means replacing uncertainty with prediction error.

 

I understand that people like the idea of "owning" a game. I bought F-14 Fleet Defender some time in the 1990s and I still have the box in all its glory. Turned out I never found the time to thoroughly learn to fly it, it's a DOS game that wouldn't run these days anymore anyway, and if I really wanted to experience flying an F-14 these days, I'd pick up a copy of DCS anyway.

Maintaining and functionally developing Steel Beasts (or any long-selling software for that matter) costs continuous effort on our end. That's why we have to charge upgrade fees, or alternatively offer you rental licenses. These offer us a smaller, but steady revenue stream that contributes to our development effort. Windows changes, Steel Beasts adapts. Software libraries change, Steel Beasts adapts. Hardware changes - and eventually, Steel Beasts will adapt to those changes too.

With your current time-based license you can still run SB Pro PE 3.0. I encourage you to do so, just for shits and giggles. It will demonstrate how much progress has been made since 2013. Come back and tell me with a straight face that you wish you had purchased a classic license of version 3.0 and never upgraded ever since. Then project that trend into the the next seven years.

 

Time-based licenses are no subscription scam; you forget about Steel Beasts, and eSim Games won't surprise you with a reminder charge on the next credit card bill. These licenses are extremely fair in conditions. You can pause with the renewal of a license after its expiration. You pay only while you continue to actually play. And you know that your payment will go directly into further software development, to make the next Steel Beasts even better.

 

 

All that being said, it's a pretty moot debate anyway. The British government decided to penalize small businesses with their import VAT tax policies, so we're not selling classic licenses to the UK anymore. It's a pity, but we're not making the rules. If you can find a second-hand CM stick with an old Steel Beasts license on it (say, on eBay), you can use that to pay merely an upgrade fee for a contemporary license. Might take some time before one materializes, but eBay will send you alert messages if you define your search terms (like "CodeMeter", and "Steel Beasts").

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  • 2 months later...

Well after some hum-ing and haw-ing after finding I couldn't get the classic licence in the UK, I've just opted for 12 months at a time and am looking forward to re-discovering SB, which I haven't played since the original SB.

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24 minutes ago, 33lima said:

Well after some hum-ing and haw-ing after finding I couldn't get the classic licence in the UK, I've just opted for 12 months at a time and am looking forward to re-discovering SB, which I haven't played since the original SB.

 

Yes I believe that's a casualty of Brexit.

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